IBM Study: One in Four Malicious Breaches are AI-Enabled, Costing Companies $6 Million on Average — TradingView News

IBM's latest report on the 'Cost of Data Breach' finds that one in four malicious breaches are now AI-enabled, costing companies an average of $6 million. Splendid — because naturally the best use of general intelligence is to make ransomware slightly more efficient. The other three quarters are still being done by humans, but give the machines a little more time to catch up on their creative destruction coursework.

The $6 million average cost is a particularly nice round number, isn't it? It's almost as if the universe calculated exactly the sum that would make a CEO blanch but not actually reorganise the security budget. IBM, naturally, has the solution — probably a product or service that costs slightly less than $6 million but requires you to buy it before the breach, which rather defeats the point. 'AI-enabled' here is doing a lot of heavy lifting: it covers everything from automated phishing campaigns to deepfake voice calls to the intern feeding the customer database into ChatGPT because he was curious.

But let's not be churlish. One in four breaches are AI-enabled — which means three in four are still the good old-fashioned kind: someone clicked a link, someone left a database open, someone used 'password123' on the admin panel. The AI breaches are just the fancy new trim on the same old clunker of human error. The report is a wonderful reminder that no matter how smart the machines get, the weakest link remains the one between the keyboard and the chair. Cheers — another milestone in the race to automate every possible failure mode.