A study released on Wednesday revealed that cost of data breaches for a number of companies across the globe has been rising. According to the study, the total average cost of a data breach has reached to about $3.8 million, which was $3.5 million in 2014.

Investigating the cause of a breach, appointing experts to fix the breach, offering credit monitors for victims and setting hotlines for them include in the direct costs. According to experts, data breaches are very common today. Last year, big companies like JPMorgan Chase, Sony Corp, Home Depot Inc and Target Corp faced data breaches.

Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security, said, “Most of what’s occurring is through organized crime. They are probably better funded and better staffed than a lot people who are trying to defend against them”.

Armonk headquartered computer hardware company IBM, which provides cyber security to a number of companies, has a strong interest in underlining the costs of data breaches. According to the study, the cost of a data breach is currently $154 per record which is stolen by hackers or lost. Last year, that cost was $145, the study revealed. To conduct the study, surveyors interviewed about 350 companies from more than ten countries that suffered a data breach.

As per authors of the study, average costs was not applied to big breaches that affected millions of customers, like those suffered by JPMorgan Chase, Target and Home Depot. Minneapolis headquartered retail company, Target, said that in 2014, a breach cost about $148 million.

According to the study, the health care was most at risk for expensive breaches. The cost of a data breach was $363per record, which was more than double the average cost for all sectors of $154.