According to a new report released on Tuesday, 77% of Indian organizations faced downtime due to cybersecurity risk during the peak festive season in the last 18 months, while 81% of global organizations experienced increased cyber threats during Covid-19 pandemic.
According to a report titled ‘Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of Covid-19,’ by McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, the top three most deadly cyber threats detected are malware attacks (47%) data breaches (43%), ransomware and cloud jacking (33% each). Over 30% of IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their ‘Internet of Things’ devices.
Venkat Krishnapur, Vice President of Engineering and Managing Director, McAfee Enterprise India said in a statement, “Cyberattacks tend to skyrocket in India during the holiday season as we tend to spend more time online and often let our guard down. Taking advantage of this, bad actors adopt newer techniques and sophisticated means to target businesses when they’re most vulnerable,”
The IT professionals in India revealed that holidays have been the most challenging peak periods for cybercrime, with 52% citing festive holidays such as Diwali, Ramadan, and Christmas as the peak period; 32% citing bank holidays, and 12% citing summer vacations in schools and colleges as the most challenging peak periods.
Maintaining a fully staffed security team/SOC at these peak periods is even more challenging for 91% of them, and with the adoption of a hybrid work model, 59% expect half or more of their organizations’ workforce to be remote in some capacity.
Given that India’s holiday and festive season has already begun, 91% of IT professionals expect increased demand for their products and services to have a modest or even significant impact. The majority of organizations have invested in cloud security (82%), advanced threat protection (66%), the security operations centre (54%), mobile security (48%), and endpoint security (48%).
Furthermore, 69% of organizations are implementing new software solutions, 68% are strengthening internal IT related communications, 62% are increasing software updates, and 61% are enhancing their staff training.