According to a new analysis from Acronis, the cost of data breaches might rise even more in 2019.

The company’s analysis predicts that the average cost of a data breach will surpass $5 million by next year, based on data gathered from more than 750,000 unique endpoints spread throughout the globe.

The experts also anticipate a sharp rise in the total number of breaches. Email scams and malware increased by 60% year over year, they reported.

New defenses against emerging threats

The latter four months of the year also saw an increase in social engineering assaults, which now account for around 3 percent of all attacks. Half of all reported cyberattacks in the first half of 2022 were caused by compromised credentials, such as leaked passwords.

Candid Wüest, Acronis’s vice president of cyber protection research, stated, “The previous few months have proved to be as complicated as ever, with new threats continually appearing and criminal actors continuing to apply the same established script for massive payments.”

When it comes to preventing hacking efforts in2018, comprehensive measures should be a top priority for all businesses. Many organisations depend on multi-factor authentication (MFA) to keep their workers and assets safe from cybercriminals, but cybercriminals are continuously adapting and are now utilising popular security solutions against us.

Compared to the first half of the year, when phishing assaults made up just 58% of all email attacks, by the third quarter they accounted for 76% (a 1.3x increase).

While the United States accounted for the vast majority of victims, attacks on firms in Germany and Brazil were also common. Also, computers in South Korea, Jordan, and China were among the most often infected.

Construction, retail, real estate, professional services, and finance were the most common sectors targeted by threat actors through phishing and malicious emails, according to the study’s authors.