Hyderabad: The world lost $3 trillion to cyber fraud in 2016, and India is ranked fifth among the most vulnerable countries, while the USA tops the list, according to a research by international agency Cybersecurity Ventures.
There are numerous perpetrators of cybercrime, from full-fledged gangs to individuals trying to poach identification and security details of a largely unaware and ignorant Indian audience.
The modus operandi is impersonation calls and e-mails, fraud insurance cover, fake job and visa opportunity, lottery etc., Pune, Noida and Jharkhand are considered hubs for cyber fraud gangs.
The Union home ministry and state governments are spending money on training personnel to carry out digital investigations, as the survey by Cybersecurity Ventures has estimated that the damage due to cyber fraud is likely to increase to $6 trillion by 2021.
India has lost money largely through phishing call offences, where the suspects approach victims as bank officials and collect their debit card details under the pretext of upgrading the account or linking it to Aadhaar. Data is also harvested by fake sites purporting to be e-commerce sites.
Indians (individuals and companies) have been attacked through their computers and mobile devices. Umesh Thota, CEO, AuthBase, a cyber expert, said, “Every company in the US and other countries has a portion of its IT budget allocated to cyber security. But this is not the case in India. Secondly, ignorance is one of the major reasons why cybercrime is so high in India. Phishing is still a very common way of stealing money from businesses. Unless people use secure mail gateways, their conversations can be eavesdropped and eventually this can be used to cheat people of their money. People need to know that it’s not hard to send email posing as someone else.”
Nilesh Kumar, research scholar in cyber security, said that data leaks like Aadhaar, bank account and other personally identifiable information are going to grow as long as different institutions that store personal data don’t secure it.
Today, public information on one website can be used to get information from another, he said.
To deal with cyber crimes, the Telangana home department is training personnel in ‘Digital investigation.’ Technical skills to investigate social media platforms, online portals, mobiles and websites are being taught. Also CCTV probing, data security are part of the training module.
