Why does it cost so much more to get hacked in the United States than anywhere else in the world? In this special bonus episode of Security Intelligence, we sit down with Michelle Alvarez, Manager of Strategic Threat Analysis at IBM X-Force, for a deep dive into IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report—and one of its most surprising findings: global breach costs are falling, but US breach costs just hit a record high. What’s driving the gap? In this episode, we unpack: Why faster detection and containment are lowering breach costs globally Why shadow AI is quietly increasing breach risk and driving up response costs Why regulatory fines, global operations and organizational scale hit US companies especially hard And how supply chain breaches, cloud complexity and shadow IT amplify the damage We also explore a critical inflection point ahead: AI isn’t a major attack target yet—but once adoption crosses key market concentration thresholds, attackers will follow the ROI. All that and more on Security Intelligence The opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM or any other organization or entity. Follow the Security Intelligence podcast on your preferred platform: https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/security-intelligence Read the Cost of a Data Breach report: https://ibm.biz/BdbkLt

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