India’s technologies ecosystem is developing at a enormous price. Home-grown startups are going worldwide and worldwide giants are coming to India to make for the next more than 500 million customers which are supposed to connect to the world-wide-web in the coming years. India is one of the most talked-about technologies ecosystems in the post-COVID planet as 2020 clearly saw some rebellion against China. While all these good developments are taking place, hackers are also becoming more and more interested in the information of Indian shoppers. 2020 saw a series of information breaches on Indian startups which left all of the shoppers and even organizations asking one query – How safe are we? Well! The answer is – our app ecosystem and organizations are not totally safe. But are Indian organizations taking safety seriously post the current hacks? Yes! Thankfully, startups specifically in the tech space are clearly taking measures to guarantee they’re safe.
Some current hacks on Indian apps & organizations
- Juspay, a payment processing enterprise faced a breach that led to a leak of more than 35 million records! A massive hack that definitely shook the sector.
- Unacademy, one of the most talked-about revolutionary startups in the tech sector faced a breach causing a information leak of more than 20 million records.
- Whitehat Jr, a different startup in the education space suffered a breach leaking more than 250,000 records.
- Dunzo, the go-to delivery enterprise also suffered a breach.
- BigBasket also got hacked in 2020 right after which they took some robust measures to strengthen safety.
- Quite not too long ago there have been indicators of attack on Indian energy grids by China. While this does not precisely count attacks on ‘apps’ or ‘businesses’ but this one just can not be ignored thinking about the severity. While this news created rounds and left the whole nation in shock, what shocked even the safety neighborhood was that there are probabilities that the attack occurred way back in May 2020. Apparently, it took more than six months to even detect malware!
While these had been some of the best startups of the nation that suffered a breach, there are hundreds of web-sites and apps that get hacked each day which do not come in the mainstream news.
What triggered this sudden rise in hacks?
Truth be told, this was extended coming. Businesses have not been focusing on securing their apps and web-sites from day one. With numerous variables combining and COVID 19 taking place, hackers got the excellent chance to exploit the vulnerabilities.
Rapid development: Thanks to access to so a great deal capital, the Indian tech sector grew massively more than the final couple of years. Users of these apps grew at a speedy pace, but safety sadly wasn’t the core concentrate. New servers had been added, which had been frequently configured badly causing leaking crucial configuration files and keys. New capabilities had been pushed to production, devoid of testing them for vulnerabilities. Hackers frequently hold an eye on developing organizations for the reason that they know safety will not be a core concentrate and that’ll be a sweet spot for them to get in.
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State-sponsored: In 2020, Australia saw a state-sponsored attack on them. This implies that their whole nation was getting attacked like government and private sectors. The one on Australia was like the energy grid attack India saw but at a national level. With ‘cyberwarfare’ getting talked about so a great deal, nations certainly appear to be strengthening their cyber approaches, and some of them currently getting offensive. Imagine getting a tech-savvy individual in a nation and obtaining paid by your government to hack other governments? That’s what state-sponsored attacks look like.
COVID-19: Due to COVID, the small business had to go all remote overnight. Businesses not only have to come up with a new operations tactic but also guarantee their personnel are smoothly transitioned to the new reality. Hackers took benefit of this weak predicament and targeted organizations that did not have sufficient time to set up safe access to their infrastructure for personnel to access from anyplace.
Lack of standard safety audits: It’s constantly far better to hack your app/web-site/network prior to hackers do. Regular safety audits are the essential to making certain that new capabilities added or new servers added to infrastructure are safe.
Sectors that have to have to be more cautious
On the dark net, because COVID 19 there has been a rise in demand for information. More than 90 per cent of ads on the dark net are about paying hackers to hack databases of organizations. Clearly, there are a couple of organizations that are more on the radar due to the sector they’re in and the sort of information they deal with.
BFSI: Attack on Juspay and leak of more than 35 million records tells us that hackers are going to hit exactly where it hurts the most.
Government: With the rise of state-sponsored attacks, governments must be super focused on safety for their infrastructure apart from creating the suitable policies about cybersecurity.
Consumer startups & E-commerce: Businesses straight catering to shoppers deal with have a lot of sensitive information which lures hackers. Right from payment info to place info – anything requirements to be protected.
Healthcare: Business and apps which straight deal with patient records or healthcare information of individuals must be super cautious about their safety. We’ve been tracking a rise in attacks on healthcare startups specifically in the post COVID planet exactly where a lot of preliminary healthcare consultation occurs on the net.
Shikhil Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Astra Security. Views expressed are the author’s personal.