By Stephen Embry
Publication Date: 2026-08-19 20:01:00
IBM’s recent Cost of a Data Breach Report ought to be a wake-up call for legal. Not just for the raw numbers but for the conclusion that “frontier AI models have radically shifted the cybersecurity threat landscape.” And that hits home hard for legal even if the legal market was not specifically studied.
The underlying research for the report was done by Ponemon Institute. That in and of itself is important because Ponemon isn’t selling a product. It’s an independent research outfit devoted to information and privacy management. So unlike many surveys that are conducted by vendors, there is less likelihood of a bias that pushes the need to buy something. For this particular survey, Ponemon studied 602 businesses in 17 industries and 16 countries.
The Raw Numbers
The raw numbers themselves are startling:
- The average cost of a data breach last year was almost $5 million, up 12% from the year before.
- There was a 56% increase in AI generated…
