Are We Ready?

It was a big DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on DNS service provider company Dyn. Major part of the Europe and North America were not able to use the major internet platforms and services. It was one of the largest DDoS attack ever recorded with 1.2 terabytes of load flowing over the network per second. The disruption may have lost companies up to $110 million in revenue and sales.

Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s largest telecom company faces a massive DDoS attack that has hit as many 10, 00,000 of its user about 5% of its fixed line customers.

Britain’s one of the biggest mobile phone company Three Mobile reported that hackers successfully accessed its customer upgrade database after using an employee login. Millions of customers were affected by this hack.

Online travel giant ibibo group owned ticketing platform RedBus also faced an attack which exposed email address, hashed passwords of large group of customers.

Possible hack by Russia has changed the US presidency scenario with the win of Donald Trump. However there isn’t any strong proof of state sponsored hack by Russia but it’s an alarming situation.

These are just a fraction of all the cyber-attacks that carried out in 2016 from around the world. India is very fast moving towards the digital economy. Government’s recent move of demonetization has created a three to four times jump in online transactions and use of plastic money. But for a country where’s people are still least concerned about the cyber security and online frauds and cheating, raises a concern for the growth of economy in long run.

Cyber Crime costs are projected to reach $2 trillion by year 2019. And India would be a sweet spot for such activity. A nation grows when the development is carried out by both the citizen and government, mutually fulfilling their responsibility. Government has taken such steps recently and in past, for better IT infrastructure and deployment of better standards for companies. But we as a citizen of India also holds some responsibility for the same.

While government is pushing for digital payments through different means. Still major amount of devices used for digital payments are not able to withstand hardware level security. Qualcomm Senior Director of Product Management Mr. Sy Choudhury said “You will be surprised that most of the banking or wallet apps around the world don’t use hardware security. They actually run completely in Android mode and user’s password can be stolen. Users use fingerprint which might be captured. In India that is the case for most of all digital wallets and mobile banking apps” . 

So now what? What about the digital security? What about the privacy? What about the mechanism or technology that will defend us from such cyber attacks?

A question still gets unanswered. Till next post, Stay safe, Stay connected.