A survey has found that the average cost of data breach for UK organisations rose for the third year in a row to £1.9m, an increase of 13% from the year before.
System failure has become the single biggest source of data breaches replacing negligence as the number one cause, said the Symantec-sponsored survey.
Cost of breaches ranged from £36,000 to £6.2m and the average data breach cost the organisations around £71 per record.
In 2009, the biggest incident of data breach had cost £2.3m.
The survey also noted that "malicious or criminal attacks" were responsible for 29% of all data breaches, up from 22% during 2009.
It said more than 37% of the cases involved system failure and that negligence as a reason had dropped 11 percentage points to reach 34%.
The survey found that seven in 10 firms hit by data breaches went for encryption technologies as a post-breach remedy, about 69% chose to strengthen perimeter controls.
