India lost $8b in cyber-crime

Ranked 5th in e-commerce security breaches; 14,000 websites hacked

India has suffered losses of approximately $8 billion due to cyber-crime in 2011 and an estimated 14,392 websites in the country were hacked in 2012, claimed Cert-In.

India has the lowest rate of security measure adoption and if attacked the average estimated cost of downtime associated with any major incident is around `30 crore a day according to a McAfee report.

For the corporate sector, the news is alarming as nearly 80 per cent of Indian business enterprises have reported data theft thro-ugh online hacking, acco-rding to Frost & Sullivan.

India is ranked fifth in terms of e-commerce security breaches.

This is alarm-worthy news since India is termed as the software capital of the world, said Akash Agarwal, head ECCouncil, India, (a global provider of certifications and training in the information security domain), that has joined hands with Institute of Advance Network Technology (IANT), to train maximum students and professionals across India.

Mr Agarwal said that “the government estimates say that India needs 5 lakh cyber security professionals by 2015 and this number is only set to grow if we do not address this immediately.”

Korea has over 15,000 hackers and China has an estimated pool of 25 million people that can participate in cyberwarfare.

He said that India does not have a cyber security strategy or an education policy either.

Only recently the University Grants Commission asked India colleges to include cyber security education into the syllabus of colleges.

“However, in my opinion, it is a very little amount, very late. India needs to take giant steps and not tiny steps,” said Mr Agarwal.

He said with the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) EC–Council aims to bridge this gap and provide India with the much needed cyber warriors and provide a platform for existing and aspiring programmers to come together and to allow India to be at par with other nations.