The Cost of Cybersecurity Breaches(And How to Minimize the Risk)

Cybersecurity breaches are increasing in frequency, scale, and cost. In Q2 2024 alone, incidents rose 30% year-on-year, with almost 2,200 attacks every day, that’s one every 39 seconds. The financial impact is climbing just as fast and in 2025, the risks have never been greater.

How much does a Cybersecurity breach cost?

The global average cost of a breach reached USD 4.88 million in 2024, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report. In highly regulated industries like healthcare, the figure can exceed USD 9 million per incident.

These numbers include:

• Direct response costs: forensics, legal fees, and customer notifications
• Regulatory fines: GDPR penalties can reach 4% of global annual revenue
• Operational downtime: in critical infrastructure, outages can cost up to USD 125,000 per hour (IBM, ENISA)
• Lost business: 21% of customers will not return after a major breach

This is why cybersecurity strategy and cost containment have become board-level priorities, not just for IT teams, but for the entire organization.

How does a cybersecurity breach affect a company’s reputation and customer trust?

Allianz Commercial’s Risk Barometer 2025
found that the “impact of a data breach is the exposure companies fear most.” These recent incidents and their aftermath will demonstrate why:

AT&T

• In 2024, the malware attack on Snowflake compromised phone records of over 100 million AT&T customers
• The company’s stock dropped by 0.3% resulting in a USD 130 million loss in market capitalization, followed by a USD 177 million as class-action settlement to customers affected by this breach

M&S

• In 2025, UK retailer M&S was hit by the Scattered Spider group, disrupting online services for 72 hours over the Easter weekend
• Losses exceeded £300 million
  , alongside a UK ICO regulatory investigation in financial losses

Disney

• In 2024, NullBulge hackers breached Disney’s Slack channels, exfiltrating 1.1 TB of sensitive data, from unreleased projects to employee personal details
• The incident likely cost hundreds of millions in legal, regulatory, and reputational damage

Trust takeaway: Customers expect privacy and protection. 83% will pause or stop spending with a breached brand for months afterward.

Why Most Incident Responses Fail to Contain Costs

Failure to respond quickly and in a coordinated and compliant manner can escalate the impact of an attack. Here’s why:

1. Delayed detection: Threat actors now use advanced techniques that evade traditional monitoring. Average detection time in 2023 was 204 days. AI-driven security can cut that to 108 days, saving over USD 1 million per incident
2. Delayed disclosure: Many regulations including GDPR, NIS2 Directive, DORA, require organizations to report cybersecurity incidents within strict timelines. Missed deadlines bring heavy fines
3. Poor crisis management and communication: Without clear roles, training, and reliable communications, response efforts stall and confusion spreads
4. Insecure communication platforms: Most consumer apps like WhatsApp and even enterprise-grade platforms like Slack or MS Teams are not fully encrypted. If attackers compromise your incident response platform, sensitive information leaks and the damage multiplies.

How to Respond to a Data Breach and Reduce Costs

When an organization gets hit by a cyberattack it must respond with speed, clarity, and control to reduce the cost.

Key steps to respond effectively:

• Plan in advance: Build and regularly test a cross-functional incident response plan.
• Engage breach response partners: Legal, IT, forensics, risk management, and PR teams must be aligned
• Use out-of-band communications: Keep a secure channel separate from your corporate network to maintain continuity if primary systems fail. To ensure continuity and control, it’s essential to have a fallback communication platform that operates out of band or completely independent of your core infrastructure
• Send secure alerts: Use a platform that can bypass mobile silent mode and reach internal and external stakeholders instantly

How Wire Minimizes the Cost and Impact of Breaches

Wire is designed to help organizations respond swiftly and securely to incidents and reduce the cost of cybersecurity breaches:

• End-to-end encryption: All messages, calls, and files are protected at rest and in transit, using Messaging Layer Security (MLS) for group-level encryption, forward secrecy, and real-time security
• Zero Trust Architecture: No device, user, or application is trusted by default. Access is strictly role-based
• Out-of-band Resilience: Wire operates independently of corporate networks, ensuring business continuity even if internal systems are compromised.

Conclusion

The cost of a cybersecurity breach is measured not only in millions of dollars, but in lost trust, regulatory exposure, and disrupted operations. Every hour of delay and every insecure channel used increases the bill.

Wire helps you keep control when it matters most, enabling secure, compliant, and coordinated action from the first moment a breach is detected.