The cost of data breaches will rise from $3 trillion each year to over $5 trillion in 2024, an average annual growth of 11 per cent.

Analysis by Juniper Research suggested this will primarily be driven by increasing fines for data breaches as regulation tightens, as well as a greater proportion of business lost as enterprises become more dependent on the digital realm.

While the cost per breach will steadily rise in the future, the levels of data disclosed will make headlines, but not impact breach costs directly, as most fines and lost business are not directly related to breach sizes.

The report anticipated that cyber criminals will use artificial intelligence-based techniques which will learn the behaviour of security systems in a similar way to how cyber security firms currently employ the technology to detect abnormal behaviour. It also highlighted that the evolution of ‘deep fake’ video editing is also likely to play a part in social media cyber crime in the future.

In spite of cyber security becoming increasingly part of corporate culture, it is not necessarily gaining traction with system users, according to Juniper Research, which expects that security awareness training will become an increasingly important part of enterprise cyber security practice.

The gains that can be made by increasing human awareness of cyber security can make more efficient use of cyber security spending, which the company stated could rise by only eight per cent per annum over the next five years.

“All businesses need to be aware of the holistic nature of cyber crime and, in turn, act holistically in their mitigation attempts,” remarked research author Susan Morrow. “As social engineering continues unabated, the use of human-centric security tactics needs to take hold in enterprise security.”

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