BENGALURU: Rising instances of data breach at companies since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic have placed sensitive information including financial details of millions of Indians at risk. India’s top firms including Air India, Big Basket, Flipkart, Mobikwik, JusPay and Dominos, among others, have been targeted by hackers since last year. A majority of such firms, however, have either not informed the impacted users or denied occurrence of such attacks.
Experts say that lack of clarity on the cybersecurity regulations in India has also added to the laxity on part of the companies. According to a report by a US telecom firm Verizon, a firm may face losses to the tune of $21,659, due to a single data breach incident with 95 per cent of incidents falling between $826 and $653,587. In India, according to the MHA estimates, there was a 300 per cent increase in cyber attacks on companies in 2020 compared to 2019.
Internet security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia, who flagged the recent Dominos India data leak, told this publication that the hackers created a search engine wherein any Domino customer could easily verify if his/ her details were compromised. “Most of these companies host the data on Amazon Web Servers where the breaches have taken place. And these could have been averted by simply deploying commands in AWS servers which could send timely alerts and signal a cyber attack. I know of 80 such breaches which have taken place on AWS servers of various firms,” Rajaharia added.
While global companies have stipulated measures for enhanced cybersecurity amid work-from-home, Indian Inc is still lagging behind. Rajaharia added that the rural community, which embraced technology during the onset of pandemic last year, was at higher risk since a majority doesn’t even know that their data is being compromised and sold online in the dark web. “...Hackers also use your precious credit card coins, by accessing your KYC details on platforms and spam you with calls for fraudulent activities. This has increased during the ongoing pandemic,” he said.