In the region, the cost of lost business jumped nearly 31% year-on-year, which contributed to the rise in overall breach costs. The use of AI and automation cut breach costs by USD $1.42 million.

Manila, August 7, 2024— IBM (NYSE: IBM) released its annual Cost of a Data Breach Report revealing the average cost of a data breach in the Southeast Asian region reached a new high of USD $3.23 million in 2024, representing a 6% increase from the prior year. Southeast Asia’s critical infrastructure organizations experienced the highest breach costs, with financial services participants saw the costliest breaches across industries (USD $5.57 million), followed by the industrial sector (USD $4.18 million) and technology (USD $4.09 million).

For the Southeast Asian region, the 2024 report included a cluster sample of companies located in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

In the region, 56% of organizations studied are deploying security artificial intelligence (AI) and automation across their security operation center (SOC), nearly 8% jump from the previous year. When these technologies were used extensively, companies shortened the data breach lifecycle by 99 days and incurred an average USD $1.42 million less in breach costs, compared to those without security AI and automation deployments. While AI technologies provide defenders with new tools for rapidly identifying and automating responses to threats, they are also expanding the attack surface and are expected to present new risks for security teams.

More organizations studied globally faced severe staffing shortages compared to the prior year (26% increase) and observed an average of USD $1.76 million more in breach costs than those with low level or no security staffing issues. However, mounting staffing challenges may soon see relief, as more organizations stated that they are planning to increase security budgets compared to last year (63% vs. 51%), with employee training emerged as a top planned investment area. Organizations also plan to invest in incident response planning and testing, threat detection and response technologies (e.g., SIEM, SOAR and EDR), identity and access management and data security protection tools.

Globally, 70% of breached organizations reported that the breach caused significant or very significant disruption. The disruptive effects of data breaches on businesses are not only driving up costs, but are also extending the after-effect of a breach, with recovery taking more than 100 days for most of the small number (12%) of breached organizations that were able to fully recover.

“Disruption is the new cost of insecurity, and security is becoming the new cost of doing business. The 2024 report shows the extent and cost of business disruption caused by data breaches, which can even lead to a complete business shutdown. As the collateral damage from data breaches intensifies, lost business and post-breach customer response costs drove the annual spike,” said Catherine Lian, General Manager, IBM ASEAN. “The stakes are higher than ever in the AI era. While generative AI can help address the skills shortage in today’s landscape where security teams are understaffed, it is also being used to create and launch attacks at scale. Security can no longer be an afterthought. ASEAN companies need to invest in AI-driven defenses to stay ahead and harness the potential of these technologies, ensuring business continuity and protecting their customers.”

Some other key findings in the 2024 IBM report for the Southeast Asian region include:

Data visibility gaps – According to the 2024 report, 41% of breaches involved data stored across multiple environments including public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem. These breaches were also the most expensive at USD $3.44 million on average and took the longest to identify and contain (287 days).
Key factors that amplified costs – The top three factors that increased breach costs for local organizations were migration to the cloud (USD $263K), IoT/OT environment impacted (USD $220K) and security system complexity (USD $181K).
Process-related activities that increased data breach costs – Lost business costs —operational downtime, lost customers, and reputation damage, among others— escalated nearly 31%, compared to the prior year. Post-breach customer response jumped 16% and notification cost increased almost 13% over the same time frame.
Data Breach Lifecycle – Southeast Asian companies studied needed an average of nearly nine months (264 days) to identify and contain incidents.
Initial attack vectors – At 16%, phishing was the most common initial attack vector and represent an average total cost of USD $3.39 million per breach. Followed by stolen or compromised credentials (USD $3.12) and business email compromise (USD $ 3.46), accounting for 13% of incidents each. Attacks using zero-day vulnerability were the most expensive entry point (USD $3.62) at 9% of breaches studied.
Fewer ransoms paid when law enforcement is engaged – Globally, by bringing in law enforcement, ransomware victims saved on average nearly USD $1 million in breach costs compared to those who didn’t – that savings excludes the ransom payment for those that paid. Most ransomware victims (63%) who involved law enforcement were also able to avoid paying a ransom.

The 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on an in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by 604 organizations globally between March 2023 and February 2024. The research, conducted by Ponemon Institute, and sponsored and analyzed by IBM, has been published for 19 consecutive years and has studied the breaches of more than 6,000 organizations, becoming an industry benchmark.