Now in its 17th year, the Cost of a Data Breach Report has become one of the leading benchmark reports in the cybersecurity industry. This report offers IT, risk management and security leaders a lens into dozens of factors that can increase or help mitigate the rising cost of data breaches.

With research conducted independently by the Ponemon Institute, this report – sponsored, analyzed, and published by IBM Security – studied 537 real breaches across 17 countries and regions and 17 different industries. In the course of nearly 3,500 interviews, we asked dozens of questions to determine what organizations spent on activities for the discovery of and the immediate response to the data breach.

The report is divided into six major sections, including:

— This executive summary with key findings and comments about how data breach costs were calculated
— A deep dive into the report’s complete findings, with dozens of charts
— An exploration of a methodology for risk quantification — Security recommendations that can help organizations mitigate the financial impacts of a breach
— Notes on the geographic, industry and company size characteristics of the organizations studied
— And a more detailed explanation of the study’s methodology and limitations