As it forced digital transformation in several sectors, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the fore a cyber security risk that poses a big challenge to both enterprises and the common man in a remote village. The pandemic has significantly widened the cyber risk surface.

While enterprises are forced to digitise their processes in order to sustain their businesses and allow their staff to work from home, the pandemic has pushed a vast number of individuals to open digital wallets to pay for online payments.

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Weakened security

“For the first time, rural India has seen a massive adoption in digital transformation. Consumers have turned to digital services for their day-to-day needs. As a result, the risk surface area has widened,” said Manish Tiwari, Senior Vice-President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Bharti Airtel.

He was taking part in a discussion at the Annual Information Security Summit 2020 organised by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) on Wednesday.

“Even ordinary housewives in villages are falling prey to the cyber frauds,” he said.

Quoting a report, he said there had been a 40 per cent increase in cyber risk insurance. “The number of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, ransomware incidents and data leaks has gone up significantly,” he said.

Companies are faced with their own set of problems. Employees, who were allowed to work from home, have become the weakest link in the security network. “There are vulnerabilities in the supply chain. A big enterprise deals with thousands of application, including third party applications,” he said.

Dhananjay Khanna, CISO of SBI Cards, said that the organisations faced with a host of new security challenges. “Every other day, look-a-likes are popping up, misleading the consumers. They steal credentials as the gullible consumers key in the information on the fake websites,” he said.

“The year 2020 has been dominated by the pandemic Covid-19 which saw push for large-scale digitisation, a shift from product applications to building large digital platforms in various domains,” Rajendra Kumar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT, said at the inaugural on Tuesday.

“There is a possibility of even surpassing the $ 1-trillion digital economy vision by 2025,” he said.

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