At an average of $9.23 million per incident, healthcare leads as the top industry for the most expensive data breach costs, according to IBM.
For its 2021 Cost of a Data Breach report, IBM and the Ponemon Institute analyzed data breaches of 100,000 records or less experienced by more than 500 organizations worldwide from May 2020 to March 2021.
Five report findings:
1. Data breaches in healthcare were the most expensive by industry at $9.23 million on average; that cost increased by $2 million from last year.
2. The average cost for mega breaches, an incident that exposes 50 million to 65 million records, was $401 million.
3. The U.S. reported the most expensive data breaches at $9.05 million per incident, followed by the Middle East at $6.93 million and Canada at $5.4 million.
4. The average time it took to identify and contain a data breach was 287 days — 212 days to detect and 75 days to contain.
5. Nearly half (44 percent) of the breaches analyzed in the report exposed customer personal data, including healthcare information, names, emails and passwords.