Rising fintech attracting hacking hawks: Report

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If fintech comes, can hackers be far behind? Confronted with the spurt in cyber threat perception as fintech explodes on the national canvas, a digital-age P B Shelley could have easily penned this line. The State of Cybersecurity 2023 report for India by Palo Alto states that India suffered the highest number of disruptive cyberattacks, The Economic Times has reported. It also stated that with a veritable explosion of digital modes of transaction and very high flow of money and data taking place in the cyberspace, hackers are becoming extremely active, targeting the countries organisations, utilities and infrastructure to create economic disruptions.

To prepare for the rising threat, India has witnessed a 75% rise in budgets to bolster cybersecurity compared with the earlier year. According to Anil Valluri, MD of Palo Alto Networks for the India and SAARC region, it is one of the highest rises in the Asia-Pacific region.

“India is among the top five most targeted countries globally. Within Japan and APAC, it is the second most targeted country… The report overwhelmingly says that India is feeling the heat across industries and transportation, banking, governments, enterprises and manufacturing segments among others,” said Valluri.

He said that the country is at risk from both cyber fraudsters attempting to cause economic damage as well as state actors on the lookout for disruptive active activities. The report stated that 67% of the government and essential service providers have witnessed a rise of more than 50% in cyberattacks. Critical infrastructure, the public sector and essential services are all confronted with such a frightening possibility from invisible sources.

Painting an alarming picture, the report claimed that as many as 66% of the country’s manufacturing companies faced risks from unsecured IoT devices that are connected to the network. IoT, or Internet of Things devices are non-standard computing hardware such as sensors and appliances that are connected in a wireless mode to a network and can transmit data.

There is a scare that 5G technology will raise the threat of cyberattacks. As much as 50% of the manufacturing companies apprehend, so do 48% of the people, logistics and transportation organisations believe that 5G will make them vulnerable to more attacks. The fact that 69% of transport and logistics firms and 67% of government and essential services have more than 50% of their infrastructure running on cloud has raised the threat perception.

“We also have a large cloud adoption ecosystem putting large segments of enterprise data and applications on the cloud coupled with hybrid work ecosystems creating a massive load on remotely controlled devices,” added Valluri.

The report, however, had a silver lining, which is high awareness of the threats and adoption of sanitising activity. More than 90% of the organisations carry out regular assessments for operational technology-related cyberattack incidents. While the average of IT and OT cybersecurity professionals working in the same or combined team in South East Asia is 82%, that for Indian organisations it is 87%.