According to the recent IBM study, $3.86 million is an average expense when dealing with a data breach.

Misconfigured clouds increased breach costs by $500,000, whereas state-sponsored incidents became the most impactful.

500 organisations which experienced data breaches were studied during the survey, and 3200 security specialists who dealt with a data leakage within a year took part in the research. 80% of the breaches which were examined appeared to have displayed Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and cost more than other breaches.

About 40% of leakages affected employee credentials or were caused by cloud misconfigurations (cloud errors were exploited in 20% of all the cases).

1/5 of all the breaches happened because there were credentials used which had already leaked before and hadn’t been changed since then.

How to protect personal data

Among the companies which couldn’t prevent a breach, those maintaining no incident response mechanisms paid about $5.29 million, and those which had at least some measures taken to protect their assets were to cover the costs $3 million lower, making a beneficial difference.