DarkReading.com reported that “Data breach costs have reached a new record high of $4.24 million per incident, representing a 10% increase from the year prior — the largest single year cost increase in the last seven years.”  The July 28, 2021 report entitled “Data Breach Cost Hits Record High of $4.24M” refers to the IBM- Ponemon Institute annual Cost of Data Breach Report 2021 which included these comments after studying “537 real breaches across 17 countries and regions and 17 different industries….In the course of nearly 3,500 interviews”:

Data breach costs rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, the highest average total cost in the history of this report.

Costs were significantly lower for some of organizations with a more mature security posture, and higher for organizations that lagged in areas such as security AI and automation, zero trust and cloud security.

I am sure no one is surprised about this bad news!