IBM report: Data breach costs in India at all-time high in 2024

The average cost of a data breach in India has reached an all-time high of ₹19.5 crore in 2024, according to an IBM report. Breach costs jumped 39 per cent since 2020 and 9 per cent from the previous year. The Indian industrial sector faced the highest impact from data breaches, with an average cost reaching ₹25.5 crore, followed by the technology industry at ₹24.3 crore and the pharmaceutical sector at ₹22.1 crore.

In its ‘Cost of a Data Breach report,’ IBM mentioned that the cost of lost business—operational downtime, lost customers, and reputation damage, among others—escalated nearly 45 per cent, and notification costs jumped 19 per cent from the previous year. The rise in detection and escalation costs was almost 7 per cent, representing the highest portion of breach costs in India. 

“As cyber-attacks gain pace and complexity, their impact on organizations becomes multi-dimensional, affecting reputational, financial, and operational aspects. Considering India is getting ready for the rollout of the DPDP Act 2023, businesses need to assess the regulatory implications of such attacks and ensure end-to-end compliance. Prioritizing data security and safeguarding critical assets to ensure only the right people can access organizational resources is essential,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM India & South Asia. 

The report stated that phishing and stolen or compromised credentials were the most common initial attack types in India, accounting for 18 per cent each. This is followed by cloud misconfiguration at 12 per cent. Business email compromise was the most expensive root cause, with an average total cost of ₹21.5 crore per breach, followed by social engineering, at ₹21.3 crore, and phishing, at ₹20.9 crore.

Thirty-four per cent of data breaches studied involved data stored on public clouds and 29 per cent across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem. Breached data stored on public clouds represented the highest costs at ₹22.7 crore, while incidents spanning multiple environments took 327 days to identify and contain. 

Healthcare sector

According to a Check Point Software Technologies report, other Indian sectors like healthcare sector has also become a major target for cybercriminals, experiencing an average of 6,935 cyberattacks per week over the past six months, compared to 1,821 attacks per organization globally.

This trend highlights the increased attack surface due to rapidly adopting technologies like electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Following healthcare, the most attacked Indian industries include education/research with 6,244 attacks, consulting with 3,989 attacks, and government/military with 3,618 attacks. The report also highlights that Indian organizations, on average, were targeted 2,924 times per week over the first six months of 2024, compared to 1,401 attacks per organization globally.

The ‘Threat Intelligence Report’ noted that information disclosure is India’s most commonly exploited vulnerability, affecting 72 per cent of organizations, followed by Remote Code Execution, impacting 62 per cent, and Authentication Bypass, affecting 52 per cent. 

Globally, 70 per cent of these breached organizations said the breach caused significant disruption. Critical infrastructure sectors like healthcare, financial services, industrial, technology, and energy organizations incurred the highest breach costs across industries, reported IBM. 

An Akamai Technologies report stated that growth in demand for APIs and applications (APPs) has transformed them into targets for threat actors. The company observed over 26 billion web attacks globally against APIs and Apps in June 2024 alone, with attacks surging by 65 per cent over the last year in the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region. This has increased vulnerability for organizations in the financial services and commerce sectors. 

The ‘State of the Internet’ report mentioned that this surge is due to organizations rushing to deploy apps to enhance customer experience and business growth. Rapid deployment expands the attack surface, exposing vulnerabilities like poor coding and design flaws in web apps. Additionally, the rapid growth of the API economy gives cybercriminals more opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities.

From Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, the APJ region experienced a surge in web attacks against APIs and applications, peaking at 4.8 billion attacks in June 2024. API attacks can occur as data breaches, unauthorized access, and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. 

API and web application attacks

During the same time frame, web attacks recorded a 65 per cent growth, continuing through the subsequent quarter. Within APJ, Australia (14.6 billion), India (12.0 billion), and Singapore (10.7 billion) bore the brunt of API and web application attacks during that period, followed by other countries.

The report said that from April 2023 to February 2024, the social media industry experienced a consistent increase in Layer 7 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Singapore experienced the highest concentration of attacks at 2.9 trillion, followed by India at 959 billion and South Korea at 544 billion.

This year’s many elections in the APJ region are a significant target for hacktivists who may disrupt through social media platforms and election-related websites. “Governments and businesses need to enhance their cybersecurity measures to safeguard against such threats by taking proactive measures such as deploying robust DDoS mitigation technologies, ensuring redundancy in critical infrastructure, and educating the public about potential cyber threats,” said the report.