India is growing, while economy is set to hit the $10trillion mark in a decade or so, clearly it is a great story but with this growth, digitization becomes great responsibility. The onus of making a robust infrastructure which helps in protecting the cyber services and digital information of the company is massive. Nearly 40% of about 53,000 cyberattacks in India occurred in the financial services sector in 2017. This makes India 7th in the list of most targeted country.
Another report from Akamai technology suggests of the phishing, website intrusion, virus and ransomware attacks as well sophisticated persistent attacks are rapidly growing in the BFSI sector in India. With the rise in Crypto-mining and crypto wallets the ransom can be facilitated in an easy way!
Wannacrypt which was unleashed in May 2017 caused havoc exploiting known vulnerabilities and showed worm like characteristics which added to its rampant spread. Android based ransomware are gaining traction because of its easy target.
There were 298 DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2017 against 37 distinct organizations. There is a rise of about 50% in DDoS attacks from the quarter before that.
The cause of trouble in India-
- There is a massive existent usage of outdated software’s and hardware which have been phased out in rest of the world. Since older systems are more vulnerable to attacks, India becomes an inevitable choice
- With initiatives like Digital India, Aadhar, GST will get a lot of sensitive personal information online and becomes a hotbed for attackers to get a hand on this data.
- Lack of awareness about how an individual can be a starting point of a massive breach.
- Lack of sophisticated defence mechanism against targeted attacks in mature organizations as well let alone the medium enterprises.
The solutions-
- Awareness about updating the software’s, upgrading the hardware’s is a must. The better the information available to user, the more vigil they will become.
- Regular updating of software patches in organizations as prescribed by the MSSPs. Regular stock of the existing technologies, its effectiveness and required upgrades over a period.
- Hands-on connect with the industry body like CERT etc which can help diffuse information quickly.
Protection to Prevention is the mantra of 2018. Against the most dangerous of attacks, the attackers ammo is the best defence and technology with Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence capabilities are required to safeguard in the next generation of cyber threats.