Compromised employee accounts are the most expensive root cause of data breaches. In fact, data breaches caused by compromised employee accounts cost US$1M more than the average data breach. This is based on the findings of the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report that IBM Security announced today.

Sponsored by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on in-depth interviews with more than 3,200 security professionals in organizations that suffered a data breach over the past year. This global study on the financial impact of data breaches revealed that these incidents cost companies US$3.86M per breach on average. Meanwhile, the average cost in ASEAN is US$2.71M.