Average cost of data breach in India has hit all-time high this year, ‘warns’ IBM report

The average cost of a data breach in India is reportedly at an “all-time high”. According to the IBM Securityreport the average cost of a data breach in the country has reached Rs 17.9 crore in 2023. The report also notes that the cost increased almost by 28% since 2020. As per the report, the most common type of attack in India was phishing (nearly 22%) which was followed by stolen or compromised credentials (16%).The report also mentioned that social engineering was the most expensive root cause of breaches at Rs 19.1 crore, which was followed by malicious insider threats, which amounted to nearly Rs 18.8 crore. Meanwhile, the costs for detection and escalation also went up by 45% since 2020. These costs also represent the highest portion of breach costs and also suggest a shift towards more complex breach investigations.

How AI helped companies to detect data breaches
Artificial Intelligence and automation also helped in speedy breach identification and containment, the report added. The report also highlighted that nearly 80% of the Indian organisations involved in the study have limited (37%) or no use (43 per cent) of AI and automation.

The report noted: “In India, companies with extensive use of AI and automation experienced a data breach lifecycle that was 153 days shorter compared to studied organisations that have not deployed these technologies (225 days versus 378 days).”
The data also mentioned that studied organisations that deployed security AI and automation saw nearly Rs 9.5 crore lower data breach costs than the ones that didn’t deploy these technologies. The report also identified AI and automation as the biggest cost saver.

In India, 28% of breaches resulted in the loss of data spread over multiple types of environments (public cloud, private cloud and on-premise). This suggests that attackers were able to compromise multiple environments and also avoided being detected.
“When breached data was stored across multiple environments, it also had the highest associated breach costs (Rs 18.8 crore) and took the longest to identify and contain (327 days),” the report said.
How global businesses plan to handle the cost
The report notes that globally businesses have different plans for handling the increasing cost and frequency of data breaches. 95% of organisations involved in the global study were discovered to have experienced more than one breach. The report claimed that these organisations are likely to pass incident costs onto consumers (57%) instead of increasing security investments (51%).