The average cost of a data breach in India reached ₹17.9 crore in 2023, almost a 28% increase since 2020, a new report said on July 25.

Why India’s data breach cost escalated to ₹17.9 cr?

According to IBM, detection and escalation costs jumped 45% over this same time frame, representing the highest portion of breach costs, and indicating a shift towards more complex breach investigations.

At nearly 22%, the most common attack type in India was phishing, followed by stolen or compromised credentials (16%).

Social engineering was the costliest root cause of breaches at ₹19.1 cr, followed by malicious insider threats, which amounted to about ₹18.8 cr.

Data breach cost saved through these methods

“The report shows that security AI and automation had the biggest impact on keeping breach costs down and cutting time off the investigation, however a majority of organisations in India still haven't deployed these technologies,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, vice president, technology, IBM India; South Asia.

Data breaching at multiple sectors

The report stated that about 28% of data breaches resulted in the loss of data spanning multiple types of environments in India (i.e., public cloud, private cloud, on-prem), indicating that attackers were able to compromise multiple environments while avoiding detection.

The report also found that while 95% of organisations studied globally have experienced more than one breach, these breached organisations were more likely to pass incident costs onto consumers (57%) than to increase security investments (51%).

Data breaches in India

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).

Organisations that used security AI and automation extensively saw nearly ₹9.5 cr less in data breach costs than organisations that did not use these technologies.

(Source: IANS)

Edited for style

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