IBM’s Annual Cost of Data Breach shows 10% increase and a 27% increase in Intellectual Property Theft!

SCMagazine reported that “IBM published its 19th annual Cost of a Data Breach Report on Tuesday, revealing a 10% increase in global average data breach costs between 2023 and 2024, the largest year-over-year increase since the COVID-19 pandemic.” The July 30, 2024 article entitled “Data breach costs up 10%, driven by staffing shortages, ‘shadow data’” (https://www.scmagazine.com/news/data-breach-costs-up-10-driven-by-staffing-shortages-shadow-data)  included these comments about “Staff shortages and ‘shadow data’ drive up breach costs”:

Another source of increased breach costs and slowed recovery times was difficult-to-track “shadow data” stored across multiple environments such as public and private clouds.

More than one-third of breaches studied involved this less visible data, and the cost of breaches involving shadow data were on average 16.2% higher than those without similar visibility issues. Breaches involving shadow data also took an average of 291 days to identify and contain, nearly 25% longer than other breaches.

Data visibility gaps across several environments contributed to a 27% increase in the theft of intellectual property (IP) over the past year, with the costs of stolen records rising 11% to $173 per record, according to IBM.

Interesting, but no surprises!!!