DailyPost 2803
WHEN EVERYONE IS A TARGET…
Getting hacked is the new normal has been a truism in vogue for quite some time now. Nobody can escape and breach is imminent and hence it is just a matter of time. This certainly drills down the gravity of the situation to a considerable degree. Either prevention or resilience or both will happen if some action is taken on it in a concrete manner by all stakeholders as per a pre decided plan and evaluate the progress thereof at regular intervals and move further. It is difficult to say if any country has moved on this trajectory. If it were to be one, it might be Estonia at the best.
For the rest of the world it has just been very sophisticated lip service and some action on legislative, policy or creation of some semi-functional institutions. The credibility of the institutions to match the challenge is suspect. Imagine it would need a police cover of the nature provided to the physical world. For sure it is a long way off. Security primarily works on threat perception, the recurrence of crime, heat map, crime beat with backend intelligence on a variety of things and on modus operandi to provide support to effective and comprehensive policing. How far are we from this as far as cyber crimes are concerned?
One headline blares; “Everyone’s a target:” Australia grapples with a surge in cyberattacks. Now it’s out in the open. This has been the best kept secret of the cyber world. You can also term as “everyone now is a prime target.” Recent spikes in cyber breaches have raised the alarm bells about the nation’s capability to defend against the escalating attacks. After a large ransomware attack on MediSecure, hackers accessed customers’ medicare data and doctors’ private information. Less than 24 hours after this attack Western Sydney University publicly revealed that data pertaining to 7500 of its staff and students was illegally accessed in a cyber breach.
Of the 15 government agencies data breaches this year, 5 have been identified as being malicious cyber activity. The intriguing part is that there are no playbooks as to who and what was at most risk. The general understanding is that today everyone has become a prime target because the cyber criminals really don’t care. They are mercenaries. They have no interest in only proving their tech prowess as it was quite sometime back. Now it is purely profit driven. While they will keep going in for meticulously researched and planned cyber attacks like in the case of ransomware attacks, they also keep looking for the low hanging fruits and they go for it. Hackers are not one genre. A negative case study, with lots to learn for India.
WHEN GOVERNMENT’S CAPABILITY TO HANDLE CYBER CRIMES BECAUSE BECOMES SUSPECT, WHERE DO THE CITIZENS GO FROM HERE?
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.