The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has been allocated a sum of Rs 400 crores under Cyber Security projects and Rs 225 crores for Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).
The CERT-In is the national bureau for event response, including prediction, evaluation, and alerts for cybersecurity breaches. Its responsibilities include increasing security awareness among the online community, offering technical support, and providing guidance on how to recover from computer security incidents.
A research report in October 2022 suggested that the Banking Finance Services and Insurances (BFSI) industry is the most lucrative sector for hackers and cybercriminals especially in the Asian region.
Cybersecurity firm CloudSEK, which conducted the research, said that whether it was nationalised banks, crypto exchanges or wallets, NBFCs or credit card information leaks, India has emerged to be the newfound hotbed for cyberattacks in Asia. It can be attributed to the growing digitalisation and online banking systems that were catapulted during the pandemic.
It is important to note that this comes at a time when India is pushing hard to be a digital economy and taking several measures towards digital payments, digital currency, etc. The aim of the government is to make these services available to people from all walks of life and hackers can very well take advantage of this — targeting someone who is not well versed with how to deal with such attacks.
Per CloudSEK, about 20 percent of reported events were threats to digital banking, which mostly comprised selling, buying, compromising, and bypassing access to various digital payment systems, banking accounts, and digital wallets (crypto or otherwise). Another major threat, accounting for 15 percent of the reported instances, involved credit card-based threats, indicating threat actors' growing interest in using financial resources to handicap targets.
One such incident took place in October 2022, when the card details of over nine million people were leaked online. State Bank of India, Fiserv Solutions LLC, American Express were some of the top banking institutions which were affected. First Published: Feb 1, 2023 4:07 PM IST
