Cyber attacks are increasing faster than in other countries: F-Secure

Global cyber criminals are hacking computers encrypting files and seeking huge ransom to release them, according to Samu Konttinen, President and CEO, F-Secure Corporation, a €148- million Finnish IT security solution provider.

While not sharing data, he said cyber attacks in India doubled last year, and it is increasing faster than in other countries as the economy is growing and companies are going online and becoming digital.

“We can only secure systems from intrusion, but cannot to help when attackers have intruded as they have sophisticated technologies. We tell clients, either pay or say bye-bye to files,” he said.

“Companies need to protect their entire IT systems not just a PC else they can be vulnerable from attacks. Today, everything is programmable, and this means everything is hackable,” he said.

F-Secure works with private sector and government in policy decisions, and has all the major government agencies including Defence, as its clients.

“We are focussing more on B2B. ,” he said without giving India-specific numbers. F-Secure’s entry in to India a few years back was through tie ups with telecom operators like Airtel and Reliance to sell their solutions and products targeted towards consumers. However, in the last two years, the focus was on B2B business. “India is one of the fastest growing markets for us, though the base for IT security remains small,” he said.

Everyday, F-Secure’s detection lab detects around 4 lakh malwares.

The challenge is to quickly isolate affected areas in the IT systems.

The company has developed technologies to detect intrusion in less than 30 minutes while on an average it takes companies over 200 days to identify that they have been hacked.

This is global average. This means, a company could have been hacked for months before knowing somebody is in a network, he said.