E-Paper
India’s data breach bill hits all-time high as AI attacks take over: IBM report
As AI reshapes the cyber threat landscape, India’s average breach cost rises to $2.79 million which is still below the global average.
A clear trend consistently pointing to threat actors increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to construct cyberattacks has become a real concern for organisations, marking a critical inflection point as a result. Tech giant IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report pointed out that the average total organisational cost of a data breach in India reached an all-time high, and that 26% of malicious breaches in India are AI-generated.
The report released today, titled ‘The AI tipping point’, noted that the overall cost to organisations from AI-generated data breaches now stands at ₹255 million (around $2.7 million). That is a 15.9% annual increase. Globally, there is a 56% increase in AI-generated attacks, with the average global cost for organisations estimated at $4.99 million. Worldwide, healthcare, financial services, industries and technology firms bear the brunt of most AI generated cyber attacks.
“India’s accelerating AI adoption is creating immense opportunities for innovation, but it is also enabling cyber threats to evolve rapidly. The findings underscore that organisations using AI and strong governance, were significantly better positioned to fend off cyberattacks,” Gaurav Agarwal, vice president, technology, IBM India and South Asia, said.
The report also points out a trend of AI model inversion attacks, the cost of which has averaged $6 million. IBM says that attackers aren’t only using AI as a tool, but are also targeting the AI models and applications organisations are increasingly using. “The most expensive types of security incidents involving an organisation’s AI model or applications were inversion and prompt injection attacks,” the report stated.
AI-generated cyberattacks cause more damage because of the pace at which they can be generated and implemented. At the same time, the report notes that breaches are getting more expensive to find and fix.
The India lens
IBM says that of all the malicious breaches suffered by organisations in the past year, as much as 26% of that share is taken by AI-generated malicious code. This highlights how AI has served to reshape the cyber threat landscape, making sophisticated attacks scaleable at rapid speeds. A key observation is that AI when being used in defence, does have a bearing on the intensity of a cyberattack. While it may not be able to fully isolate an organisation, the spread of the attack can be contained and responses can be deployed faster. That would include isolating critical infrastructure and systems.
“Today, most organisations apply AI in limited ways, often focused on detection. To keep pace, AI with agentic capabilities must be embedded across the full security lifecycle — from detection and analysis to prioritisation and remediation. That should be the strategic imperative for businesses to build resilience and a competitive advantage,” Agrawal said.
India’s cost from cyber attacks is around 56% of the global average, at $2.79 million as against $4.99 million.
The 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report identifies that 53% of organisations that suffered a cyber attack, didn’t have data encrypted when in the stage of storage, or data that was being transferred at the time of the breach. Credentials, identities, and data were key targets for cyber attacks, and these recorded breaches involved between 2,590 and 115,380 compromised records.
