Cyber attacks trebled in India within two months following the Covid-19 pandemic led remote working trend. With enterprises slowly calling employees back to work, we expected such crimes to reduce. However, a new report claims that during the peak festival season 77 per cent of the businesses experienced downtime due to an increased cybersecurity risk.
At a global level over the past 18 months, this figure was 81 per cent, says a new report commissioned by McAfee and executed by FireEye.
The top three most threatening cyber risks that were detected are malware attacks (47 per cent), data breaches (43 per cent), ransomware and cloud jacking (33 per cent each), over 30 per cent of the IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their `Internet of Things` devices, says the report titled 'Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of Covid-19'.
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In a statement, McAfee claimed that IT professionals felt the holidays were the most challenging peak periods for cyber crimes. While 52 per cent of those surveyed said the festivals such as Diwali, Ramadan and Christmas saw such crimes peaking, 32 per cent pointed to bank holidays as the worst risk and 12 per cent felt that during summer vacations in schools and colleges, the crime rate was highest.
“Cyberattacks tend to skyrocket in India during the holiday season as we tend to spend more time online and often let our guard down. Taking advantage of this, bad actors adopt newer techniques and sophisticated means to target businesses when they`re most vulnerable,” said Venkat Krishnapur, Vice President of engineering and managing director, McAfee Enterprise India said in the statement.
During these peak periods, 91 per cent of the businesses found that maintaining a fully staffed security team/SOC to be more challenging as with the adoption of a hybrid work model, 59 per cent of them expect half or more of their organisations` workforce to be remote in some capacity.
As the holiday and festive season in India has already commenced, 91 per cent of the IT professionals anticipate a moderate or even substantial impact by increased demand for their products and services. Organisations invested in cloud security (82 per cent), advanced threat protection (66 per cent), security operations center (54 per cent), mobile security (48 per cent) and endpoint security (48 per cent).
Further, to take additional security precautions, 69 per cent of the organisations are implementing new software solutions, 68 per cent are strengthening internal IT related communications, 62 per cent are increasing their software updates and 61 per cent of them are shooting up their employee training, the statement said.
Another survey had recently reported that C-suite executives were most likely to ask for relaxed mobile security protocols. The research published by MobileIron said over three-quarters of such executives admitted to having requested a waiver on enterprise security protocols last year, the company's study revealed, despite these workers being the most vulnerable within their organisation to fall to security scams.
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