Will 2020 be any better or wait for 2021 to come?
A sense of vulnerability is replacing the confidence, whether to move to the cloud or to keep safe at the on-premise or to have a hybrid approach and if one goes for both, then the cost matters a lot. Economic and political polarization will rise in 2020, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks report, It warns that geopolitical turbulence and the retreat from multilateralism threatens everyone’s ability to tackle shared, critical global risks and there are severe threats and long-term risks.
It estimates that 26% of Indian customers prefer accessing services via the bank’s website and mobile app rather than talking to a human agent against 19% in Australia, 21% in Britain and 24% in the UAE. Mobile-first consumers are more vulnerable to malware variants devised to steal personal banking information by cyber criminals. Increasing demand for faster BFSI transactions, particularly the ones across the border, are being targeted by cyber criminals.
India Inc. continues to remain vulnerable to cyber-attacks, as per EY. Indian organizations are reluctant to invest in their cybersecurity architecture, despite 53% of those surveyed by EY’s Global Information Security Survey Report 2020: India edition, admitting to having experienced a significant cyber breach in the past 12 months, while most businesses continue to remain vulnerable with 59% stating that they are unlikely to detect a sophisticated cyber-attack, only 31% said that their cybersecurity team is involved right from the start of a new business initiative.
Finally, India has pressed the pedal on reforms to secure interest and investment for manufacturing. These reforms were being executed by both the Central and State Governments over the years but the pace has picked up in 2020. Organizations need to adopt stringent security measures – moving beyond stronger passwords, PII, firewalls – cyber criminals too invest in sophisticated methods to by-pass the systems.
The prevalence and severity of cyber-attacks seem to be increasing at an alarming rate every year. So much so, that cybercrime is expected to cost the global economy a colossal 6 trillion dollars per year by 2021. The ATM hacks are going to get more frequent and most ATM’s of the leading manufacturers are vulnerable to security breaches. As per the report from Positive Technologies, 69% of the ATM’s are vulnerable to existing attacks. Interestingly, the ATM Malware was the most expensive hacker service on the DarkNet in 2018 while 2019 saw the ATM Jadi malware which attacks specific banks. Another interesting piece of malware first detected in India in 2019 was ATMDtrack, and is programmed to cash out ATMs. So, the attacks on ATMs in 2020 are expected to get more frequent, sophisticated and targeted.
Secondly, Fraud-as-a-Service isn’t rare anymore, especially account-centric frauds: Support for smart cards at purchase points, biometric authentication, tokenization of payments, etc. have made hacking more difficult for cybercriminals. It means financial organizations need to prepare harder for more and frequent attacks, of varied intensity.
Having said that, the era of social engineering and phishing is not over yet, while newer and innovative ways of stealing financial data emerge every day, conventionally tried and tested methods of financial cybercrimes like phishing, network scanning, virus/ malicious code, website defacements and website intrusion & malware are growing as strong as ever.
While RBI and the Government are taking proactive steps to battle cyber-attacks, they are also dependent on the coordinated and timely action from stakeholders. This is to say; security contracts should not be limited to uptime and resolution of vulnerabilities but must be embedded in an organization’s ecosystem. Security boundaries for all players in the BFSI sector should also be extended to end users. These measures should be supported by multichannel, multilingual and multicultural campaigns aimed at consumer education and awareness.
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