Average data breach cost touches record Rs 19.5 cr

Bengaluru: The average cost of a data breach in India reached an all-time high of Rs 19.5 crore this year, as the local industrial sector experienced the costliest cyber attacks across sectors, a report showed on Wednesday.

The Indian industrial sector faced the highest impact from data breaches, with average cost reaching Rs 25.5 crore, followed by the technology industry at Rs 24.3 crore and the pharmaceutical sector at Rs 22.1 crore.

The cost of lost business - operational downtime, lost customers and reputation damage, among others - escalated nearly 45 per cent and notification costs jumped 19 per cent from the previous year, according to the annual report by tech major IBM.

The most common initial attack types in India were phishing and stolen or compromised credentials, accounting for 18 per cent of incidents each, followed by cloud misconfiguration (12 per cent). Business email compromise was the costliest root cause at an average total cost of Rs 21.5 crore per breach, followed by social engineering (Rs 21.3 crore) and phishing (Rs 20.9 crore) as the next highest costs.