India Inc loses 1,000cr in two years to cyber attacks
Source: TOI
MUMBAI: Indian industry has made the internet an important conduit for conducting business. But by doing this, it has also opened itself to assaults by cybercriminals . In the last two years, Indian businesspersons have incurred a loss of around Rs1,000 crore because of data theft through phishing.
Hackers, no longer content with mass-mailing spam containing malware, have of late started targeting specific, highprofile individuals, as the recent attempt to hijack ADAG chairman Anil Ambani's email account shows. You need not be a captain of industry to be at risk, though. Even if you own a small business, but have an online presence with your own domain, you are a potential target.
"In the Ambani case, a corporate official crosschecked the received email with the supposed sender—a reporter with a foreign wire service—and found that the person had not sent any such mail. An investigation showed that the mail had been sent from Israel. Apart from Ambani, it had been sent to four other high-profile individuals," an officer from the police's cyber cell said. "But such rigorous checking and verification of email is not done by most businesspersons, making them extremely vulnerable . The modus operandi in most instances is the same: the hacker sends the email after creating a fake id of a person known to the targeted individual."Among the victims has been Bandra-based Sadooq Rizvi, the managing director of Biggdigital .com. On July 28 last year, his site came under attack from a Pakistani group. Later, he found that he had lost information contained in his email ID hosted by his site. "It was then that we seriously started taking steps to secure our site against attacks," he said.
MUMBAI: Indian industry has made the internet an important conduit for conducting business. But by doing this, it has also opened itself to assaults by cybercriminals . In the last two years, Indian businesspersons have incurred a loss of around Rs1,000 crore because of data theft through phishing.
Hackers, no longer content with mass-mailing spam containing malware, have of late started targeting specific, highprofile individuals, as the recent attempt to hijack ADAG chairman Anil Ambani's email account shows. You need not be a captain of industry to be at risk, though. Even if you own a small business, but have an online presence with your own domain, you are a potential target.
"In the Ambani case, a corporate official crosschecked the received email with the supposed sender—a reporter with a foreign wire service—and found that the person had not sent any such mail. An investigation showed that the mail had been sent from Israel. Apart from Ambani, it had been sent to four other high-profile individuals," an officer from the police's cyber cell said. "But such rigorous checking and verification of email is not done by most businesspersons, making them extremely vulnerable . The modus operandi in most instances is the same: the hacker sends the email after creating a fake id of a person known to the targeted individual."Among the victims has been Bandra-based Sadooq Rizvi, the managing director of Biggdigital .com. On July 28 last year, his site came under attack from a Pakistani group. Later, he found that he had lost information contained in his email ID hosted by his site. "It was then that we seriously started taking steps to secure our site against attacks," he said.
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