During peak festive season in the last 18 months 77 per cent of organisations in India experienced downtime due to cybersecurity risk, while 81 per cent of global organisations experienced increased cyber threats during Covid-19, a new report revealed on Tuesday.
According to McAfee Enterprise and FireEye’s report titled ‘Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of Covid-19’, the top three most threatening cyber risks that were detected are malware attacks (47 per cent), data breaches (43 per cent), ransomware and cloud jacking (33 per cent each), over 30 per cent of the IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their ‘Internet of Things’ devices.
“Cyberattacks tend to skyrocket in India during the holiday season as we tend to spend more time online and often let our guard down.
Taking advantage of this, bad actors adopt newer techniques and sophisticated means to target businesses when they’re most vulnerable,” said Venkat Krishnapur, Vice President of engineering and managing director, McAfee Enterprise India said in a statement.
According to IT professionals in India, holidays have been the most challenging peak periods for cybercrimes — while 52 per cent of them indicated festive holidays such Diwali, Ramadan, Christmas as the peak period; 32 per cent of them pointed at bank holidays, and 12 per cent of them at summer vacations in schools and colleges.
During these peak periods, 91 per cent of them find maintaining a fully staffed security team/SOC even more challenging as with the adoption of a hybrid work model, 59 per cent of them expect half or more of their organisations’ workforce to be remote in some capacity.
As the holiday and festive season in India has already commenced, 91 per cent of the IT professionals anticipate a moderate or even substantial impact by increased demand for their products and services. Most organisations have invested in cloud security (82 per cent), advanced threat protection (66 per cent), the security operations center (54 per cent), mobile security (48 per cent) and endpoint security (48 per cent).
Further, to take additional security precautions, 69 per cent of the organisations are implementing new software solutions, 68 per cent are strengthening internal IT related communications, 62 per cent are increasing their software updates and 61 per cent of them are shooting up their employee training.
