Security breaches are rising at an alarming rate in India
In 2016, India witnessed 36.6 million data records being compromised according to a Gemalto research. A total number of reported data breaches stood at 33 marking a 14% hike in data breaches compared to that of 2015. According to the firm, more than seven billion data records have been compromised since 2013. Can an emerging economy poised for growth afford to have such breaches?
Financial data is the most common target
Identity theft and unauthorized access to financial data constituted 73% of the accounted data breaches. Firms are tight-lipped about their losses and almost 61% of them did not disclose the number of compromised records when they reported it. Data security is still in nascent stage in India and therefore lack of awareness towards it leads to such breaches.
Tech sectors have been hit the most
As per reports, technology sector witnessed the highest number of security breaches. The health care industry is at the second spot and accounted 28% of all data breaches, marking a 11% rise from 2015 reports. Vice President for Data Protection at Gemalto, Jason Hart noted that lately the cyber criminals were shifting to entertainment and social media sites from financial organizations.
The biggest breach of financial data in India
According to reports, 3.2 million debit cards were hacked in one of the biggest data breaches the country has ever seen. SBI had to reissue over 600,000 debit cards and also ask its users to change their debit card pins. Not only SBI, HDFC Bank, ICICI, YES Bank and Axis were also among the banks got hit by the same malware-related security breach.
Keep yourself safe from getting hacked
Encryption and authentication are the two corner stones to make sure that your data is safe. Using anti-viruses is a must and users should be cautious about pop-ups that can infiltrate malwares in a system. One should always shop on secured sites, set different passwords for different sites, never leave a social media site logged in and not share financial details unless necessary .
Beaten in his own game
The word 'hacker' originally meant "one who makes furniture with an ax. The world's most wanted hacker Jeremy Hammond, who was working for the hacking movement "Anonymous", was himself hacked and arrested because his password was his cat's name plus '123'.
