The typical price of an information breach in South Africa is R53.1-million in 2024, in keeping with analysis by IBM.
That is in keeping with IBM’s annual Price of a Knowledge Breach Report, revealed this week.
Stolen or compromised credentials have been the commonest preliminary assault vectors in South Africa, accounting for 17% of all cyberattacks. All these assaults averaged a complete price of R56-million per breach.
Phishing assaults accounted for 12% of safety breaches within the interval, on common costing R56-million per assault. The most costly kind of assault was as a consequence of enterprise e-mail compromise, accounting for 10% of the breaches studied and costing R63-million per assault.
“South African organisations are going through cyberthreats and knowledge breaches [growing] at an exponential fee, and this highlights the pressing want for strong cybersecurity measures,” stated IBM South Africa GM Ria Pinto.
“Because the complexity and frequency of those threats grows, deploying AI-driven safety options turns into essential in safeguarding our nationwide digital infrastructure.”
The report exhibits that 78% of organisations domestically studied are deploying AI-infused cybersecurity instruments by means of their safety operations centres, a ten% improve from the earlier yr. Native organisations that “used AI extensively”, it stated, incurred a mean of R19-million much less in breach prices.
Healthcare sector
In 2024, the 19th yr of IBM’s annual report, South Africa was ranked the 14th most costly nation by price of an information breach out of 16 international locations studied. The US was the costliest, with the typical knowledge breach costing US$9.36-million, or greater than 3 times the fee in South Africa.
Different international locations/areas within the IBM examine embody: the Center East, Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Canada, the UK, Japan, India and Brazil.
Globally, the healthcare sector suffered essentially the most bills per assault on common. The typical price of a breach on this sector was $9.8-million in 2024, down 10.6% from $10.93-million the earlier yr. The monetary and industrial sectors have been subsequent in line, with common prices of $6.1-million and $5.6-million per breach, respectively.
IBM recognized safety staffing shortages as one of many key elements that drove up the price of a breach in 2024. In keeping with the report, greater than half of the organisations studied globally – out of a complete of 604 – had extreme or high-level staffing shortages. When these corporations suffered breaches, the ensuing prices have been between $3-million and $4-million larger than corporations with enough staffing.
“Mounting staffing challenges might quickly see aid as extra organisations worldwide acknowledged that they’re planning to extend safety budgets in comparison with final yr (63% vs 51%), and worker coaching emerged as a prime deliberate funding space,” stated IBM.
“Globally, organisations additionally plan to put money into incident-response planning and testing, menace detection and response applied sciences, identification and entry administration, and knowledge safety safety instruments,” IBM stated. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media
