The bill remains steep for Canadian companies that are victims of cybercrime, but those that use artificial intelligence can manage to limit the costs, according to a report from the computer company IBM.
Organizations in the country that were affected by a cyberattack between March 2023 and February 2024 paid an average of $6.32 million per data breach incident, according to figures released Tuesday by the American firm.
This is slightly lower than the previous two years, which were 6.94 and 7.05 million, respectively. IBM attributes this decline to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by companies.
While this technology can benefit malicious people, it also has the power to speed up the work to identify and contain a breach, reducing its duration and costs, IBM’s analysis supports.
Two-thirds (61%) of Canadian businesses are now using AI and automation. And those that have used these tools in cybersecurity have seen beneficial effects, according to the report.
The latter reveals that the lifecycle of a breach was reduced to 42 days and the bill to 1.7 million on average compared to companies that did not use these technologies. Threat intelligence combined with employee training and identity and access management (IAM) are a combination that can “significantly reduce the total cost of a breach”, maintains the IT company.
Broken down by industry, IBM data shows that financial and technology companies experience the highest breach costs.
The Canadian financial sector paid an average of $9.28 million per breach, followed by the technology industry ($7.84 million) and the industrial sector ($7.81 million).
Over the past year, phishing was the most common type of attack in Canada, accounting for 14% of all breaches and costing an average of $6.38 million. The most financially devastating, but less common (9%), threat was malicious insider breaches, costing an average of $7.61 million.
The Canadian data is part of a larger report. The researchers analyzed more than 600 organizations affected by data breaches, spread across multiple industries and more than 15 countries and regions around the world. The study was conducted by the Ponemon Institute.