Tech in Brief : Cyber Resilience

The ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber attacks is known as Cyber Resilience. Cyber resilience is now being increasingly desired by companies, organizations and even governments these days.

A cyber resilient government/organization should be able to protect itself against cyber risks, defend against and limit the severity of attacks, and ensure its continued survival despite an attack.

Globally, the data and cybersecurity breaches across the world have had one common factor lack of awareness about the breach . It takes a lot of time to ascertain if the data has indeed been leaked. Hence, it is important to improve digital literacy among the global population.

Given the rise of digital technology in our lives and the increased use of technology, Cyber resilience has emerged over the past few years because traditional cybersecurity measures are no longer enough.

Cyber Resilience for India

• As per a study by the Digital security firm Gemalto, it was found that 3.24 million records were compromised in India in 2017. This is a 783 percent increase from 2016.
• Stealing information, espionage, threatening corporates, weaponizing software by installing malicious scripts and disrupting work are all happening at an alarming pace.
• Most of these losses were identity theft.
• With the Digital India campaign in full swing, the cyber threats have also evolved to become more sophisticated as confirmed by recent WannaCrypt and Petya ransomware attack.
• An intelligent cybersecurity framework shall approach all data crunching and calculation in the context of the business risk it poses.
• India needs a national law on cybersecurity and also on privacy.

Why cyber-resilience is important?

Cyber-resilience allows us to reduce financial losses, meet legal and regulatory requirements( acts on privacy) and improves our data-secure culture and build upon internal processes. This will increase the confidence of the common people on digital technologies and allow the government to benefit from the whole gamut of technology.