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“Train the weakest link first”
From an Indian context, two factors represent the digital growth within the country – The mammoth mobile subscription base of roughly 860 million connections that has a rapidly growing (167% growth rate) smartphone segment and the internet penetration which from its current 200 million stand is poised to grow to over 350 Million by 2015. This growth presents various interesting opportunities for organisations to connect with their target group and engage with them.
As individuals and businesses Internet is getting embedded in every part of our life from online banking to social networking. With the ever increasing uptake of this medium in an emerging country like India we also need to educate and inform the citizens and other stakeholders of the potential threats that are emerging.
Banking sector especially in the last decade has seen its share of growth in using the digital technology from online banking to mobile applications on the positive side and on the negative front too with credit card fraud to hacking of online accounts. As always, in the case of security exploits, the attacker looks at the weakest link in the system, which often lie not in the technology but in the person using it (read humans).
Banking sector is a sector where trust is one of the most important cornerstone and bankers laid a huge emphasis on it ever since the inception of the sector. However, with the emergence of new media the cues for trust are easy to fake and often used by the malicious party. From very early on the criminals have copied bank sites and lured innocent users to log into fake sites, this tactic is commonly known as a phishing attack!
In the last few years however the criminals have got organized and cyber crime has become much more organized like any other professional business. So, it is important to know who we are fighting against, especially in a sector like banking where stakes are high. Security of online assets needs to be of utmost priority for a bank today with ever increasing threat! One of the most important building block in achieving this goal would be educating their own workforce and customers on tacking online security threats, so that they do not end up being the weakest link!
In 2014, MixORG has started a special focus on information dissemination related to cyber-security research and education. We are writing a 5 post series summarizing some of our research focusing on new media threats and opportunities for India #cybersecurityeducationforIndia

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