7. Limor Kessem, IBM

The global average cost of a data breach has reached an all-time high of $4.35 million, according to an annual IBM report. This is likely contributing to the rising costs of goods and services.

Limor Kessem is IBM Security‘s principal consultant of cyber crisis management. She made waves this week for identifying the factors the cause breaches, such as poorly secured clouds. 

“The more records are lost in each case, the more costly the breach,” she said. “We also see this in third-party compromises, where one breach can impact a number of organizations. The other is that we’re seeing more ransomware and destructive attacks than before, which are much costlier to businesses due to the disruption and downtime that follows. Twenty-eight percent of breaches were caused due to one of these two forms of disruptive attacks.”

Link here to learn more from the IBM data breach cost report.