NEW DELHI: Over 59% of Indian adults fell victim to the growing number of cyber crimes in the past year, said a report by cybersecurity software company, Norton Lifelock. The company surveyed over 10,000 adults in 10 countries – Australia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). Of these 1,000 adults were from India.
According to the report, a whopping 27 million Indian adults were victims of identity theft in the past 12 months, and 52% of adults in the country do not know how to protect themselves from cyber crime. “In a year of lockdowns and restrictions, cybercriminals have not been deterred. More Indian adults fell victim to identity theft in the past 12 months and most are concerned about data privacy,” said Ritesh Chopra, director sales and field marketing, India & SAARC Countries, NortonLifeLock.
Cyber security related incidents have seen a general rise in the past year, aided by the burgeoning use cases of remote working tools. India wasn’t the only country witnessing a rise in cyber crimes either. The Norton report found that a quarter of Americans “detected unauthorised access to an account or device” in the past 12 months. “Of the nearly 108 million Americans who experienced cybercrime in the past 12 months (41%), an average of 6.7 hours was spent trying to resolve the issues created, for an estimated over 719 million hours of Americans’ time lost to cybercrime,” the report stated.
On the other hand, remote working infra is just one of the means for hackers to compromise organizations. Many hackers have tried to take advantage of the pandemic itself to compromise users’ devices or accounts. These include phishing attacks that claim to inform users about vaccines or other covid-related measures. Security firm, Checkpoint Security, had recorded about 192,000 such attacks per week by May 12, 2020 alone.
