India had reported a total of 11,58,208 cybersecurity incidents in 2020-21. Cybersecurity attacks increased to 12,13,784 till October 2021, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, informed the Rajya Sabha.
The nature of cybercrime is on an individual, organisation and state/society level.
In the total cybercrime landscape, online social media fraud consists of 24 per cent, online financial fraud is at 56 per cent. “Most of them are linked to frauds related to UPI in which money is debited by scanning a QR code. 99 per cent of people are unaware that when someone is asking them to scan a QR code it is for taking their money (unlawfully),” said Prof Triveni Singh, IPS SP. Cybercrimes, Uttar Pradesh Police, India.
Cybersecurity trends in 2022
“In the last two years we have seen an exponential growth in Digital adoption and transformation. Due to this, Cybersecurity risks have gone up manifold. A traditional approach to safeguard information and information processing systems from unauthorised access, modification and the likes is becoming less relevant. We need to leverage new age security technology which provides better security assurances, holistically,”Ambarish Singh, CISO, Godrej and Boyce told W.Media.
He further explained that some of the security technology adoptions we will see in 2022 are new age Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) tools, VDI, Zero Trust based technologies (work from anywhere and from any device.) EDR, Cloud security tools, security tools for BYOD, new age SIEM etc.
Preparedness of organisations to deal with data breaches
In Cybersecurity terminology there are two types of people / organisations, either they know that they have been breached or they don’t.
Organisations are at various maturity stages of their cybersecurity journey. The progress depends on the nature of businesses and the role of cybersecurity in ensuring that they operate in a secure environment.
“In order to prevent data breach, organisations must have people with the right skills, technology and process that complement each other. Most of the organisations lack visibility and hence they do not know the current state and are unable to fix the security issue,” said Singh.
He further added in order to have a fair preparedness to handle security breaches, it is important to have good technologies to monitor what is happening in an organisation – Security Operations Center (SOC) equipped with new age Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) solution with relevant threat feeds, well thought through and practiced incident response plan, threat feeds. Technologies and processes must be deployed at each layer of the NIST Cybersecurity framework – Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and recover. Organisation needs to think like a hacker and be ahead of them.
Zero Trust network
Zero trust is a framework where no user / device is trusted. Access to an application to any user is given based on the various current parameters such as current status of the user credentials (in breached list or not etc.), current status of the device from which access has been requested (Vulnerability and update status etc.), from where access has been initiated (geo-location etc.), based on the above parameter, access to the application is provided at that point of time and privilege may get downgraded based on the above data post authentication.
It is a fact that there is no single tool which can meet all the requirements of zero trust. Many technologies and processes must talk to each other to make this happen.
“Achieving zero trust is a long journey and every organisation is at different stages. To make this happen, organisations need to think strategically for the long term, they particularly need to think about how specialised security technology / processes will help achieve zero trust framework in time to come. We need to build a strong security culture in an organisation to achieve this in both the long and short term,” said Singh.
According to a recent Fortinet report, while most organisations have a vision of zero trust or are in the process of implementing zero-trust initiatives, more than half of organisations cannot translate this vision into the solutions they are implementing because they lack some basic core fundamentals of zero trust.
