HYDERABAD: Cyber-espionage in public administration is one of the most daunting security breaches that continue to be on the prowl. There have been at least 23,399 incidents noted over the past year across the State, as highlighted in an investigation report, of which the State government is a contributor.
The State, along with 73 other world organisations, have provided data on various incidents of data breach, to Verizon enterprises who is creating a compilation of all such incidents across various industry verticals.
“We are the first to have given data to the company for supporting the cause of better research. Only metadata sets have been supplied to them, we have masked the data and gave only action data to the team,” said Mustafa Sheikh, joint director, infrastructure, IT department, the government of Telangana.
Though the State government seems to be taking proactive steps in curbing the data breaches, according to the said report, a majority of data breaches (75 per cent), across the world including Telangana, are conducted by external players.
However, the report compiled by Verizon with 74 partners also noted how employees working with the public departments were also integral to spying, citing that 30 per cent of breaches were caused by internal actors. Those at the helm of administrative roles seem to have inflicted the deepest injuries to the safety of public files as ‘privilege misuse’ and ‘errors’ made by insiders accounted for 30 per cent of data breaches. This has led to a compromise of not just internal data (68 per cent) but also jeopardised personal data by 22 per cent.
As per the report, a lot of the breaches were caused due to public employees clicking on malicious attachments sent via e-mails.
The attachments often lead to malwares like Spyware and Keylogger, to automatically be downloaded into the official systems, causing the host operator to take control over their systems.
Surprisingly, the data points out that cyber espionage is on the rise for the past few years. Between 2017 and 2018, cyber spying increased from 25 per cent to 42 per cent.
“We are in constant touch with industry players to look into aspects of cyber security and overcome potential threats,” Sheikh added.
Healthcare industry also affected
The report also found that ransomware malware has found its way in the healthcare industry. Ransomware malware comprised at least 28 per cent of the 41,686 security breach incidents in State. If siphoning of finances is one aspect in these cases (80 per cent), espionage (11 per cent) and dun and grudge totalled to 6 per cent