Single data breach now costs nearly Rs 17.5 cr in India: Study

New Delhi, July 27 (IANS): The estimated average cost of a data breach in India went up to an all-time high of Rs 17.5 crore in 2022 a 6.6 per cent increase from last year, a new study showed on Wednesday.

The average cost has climbed 25 per cent from Rs 1.4 crore in 2020.

Moreover, India’s average per record cost of a data breach in 2022 reached Rs 6,100, a 3.3 per cent increase from Rs 5,900 in 2021, according to the ‘Cost of Data Breach Report 2022’ by tech major IBM.

Top three industries per record cost were industrial at Rs 9,024, the services sector at Rs 7,085 and the technology sector at Rs 6,900.

“We have reached a point where cyberattacks are evolving into market stressors, hurting the economy. Sixty per cent of global businesses have raised their prices as a result of the data breach, contributing to inflation, and inadvertently passing the cost on to customers,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, VP Technology, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India and South Asia.

The largest share of data breach costs in 2022 was post-breach response, at Rs 7.1 crore, increased from Rs 6.7 crore in 2021.

Among the top three primary initial attack vectors for data breach, stolen or compromised credentials were at Rs 21.6 crore, phishing at Rs 20.6 crore and accidental data loss or lost device at Rs 19 crore.

The average mean time to identify a data breach decreased from 239 to 221 days and the average mean time to contain a data breach increased from 81 to 82 days, the report noted.

“Further, we witnessed organisations with less than 50 per cent remote work adoption took 212 days as the average mean time to identify a data breach and 75 days as the average mean time to contain a data breach,” it added.

Third party involvement, occurrence of cloud migration (when the organisation is in the process of migrating to the cloud) and IoT and OT (Operational technology) environment being impacted were the three factors associated with the highest cost increase, the findings showed.