Brief

Cyber-crime is a key concern in India

IBM’s Global Security Index quarter looks at cyber-crimes and their impact on business. Priya Jain reports

Cyber-crime is perceived to be a critical threat by Indian businesses and its biggest impact is in terms of loss of revenue, IBM’s latest Global Security Index (GSI) quarter, a global survey on cyber-crimes and their impact on businesses, has revealed. The survey highlights the findings on 150 Indian businesses compared to the global group as a whole. It throws light on whether cyber-crimes pose a greater threat to organisations than physical crimes and brings into focus other important security aspects.

In 2005, IBM started giving out a GSI every quarter that assesses, measures and analyses potential network security threats based on the data collected by IBM’s 3,000 worldwide information security professionals, thousands of monitored devices and strategic security business partners. The GSI is a brief excerpt from the Global Security Digest that can be bought.

Praveen C Kumar, Security and Privacy Services Executive, IBM Global Services, Asia Pacific said, “We at IBM do a lot of internal intelligence market analysis and surveys for the benefit of our customers.”

IBM is planning to spin off security as a separate vertical unit within the organisation and hence these studies, as they will help them understand what the customer wants. “We wanted to find out what interests CIOs when it comes to security,” said Kumar.

He added, “Through this survey we found out that cyber-crime is a critical threat for Indian businesses. It also revealed that cyber-crime’s biggest impact in India was on loss of revenue. We also see that in terms of investment in security appliances firewall continues to be top priority, while vulnerability and patch management are secondary.”

Organisations in action

Government organisations and BFSI are investing more in prevention of cyber-crime so as to avoid phishing, hacking, and virus attacks. Private sector banks have taken steps to go beyond firewalls and provide security using new technologies like identity management software to win the confidence of their customers. Kumar is of the view that a firewall is not sufficient. Hence, companies should include technologies like identity management and two-factor identification in their business processes. They should also track denial of service attack to provide secure Internet banking to their customers.

The government can also help Indian enterprises by ensuring regulatory laws and guidelines. “There is a necessity in the industry to secure research patents, have digital rights management and provide security enablement of internal users. Internal threats on laptops, desktops and social engineering attacks can be kept in check by having a good employee termination policy,” said Kumar.

Cyber-crime costlier

Both cyber-crime and physical crime are viewed as considerable threats by Indian and global businesses. 44 percent of Indian businesses perceive cyber-crime as a bigger threat than physical crime (31percent) to their business, while 40 percent of the global businesses feel the same.

When it comes to the cost impact, 67 percent of IT executives in India think cyber-crime proves more expensive to their organisations than physical crime (31 percent). Globally, 58 percent of businesses believe cyber-crime to be more expensive, while 42 percent feel physical crime is.

The cyber-crime threat now comes from a number of new areas. IT executives in India (91 percent) and global businesses (84 percent) believe that organised criminal groups possessing technical sophistication are replacing lone hackers. The threat from unprotected systems in developing countries is also emerging, according to 65 percent of Indian businesses (compared to 63 percent of global businesses). 78 percent of Indian businesses (compared to 66 percent of global businesses) perceive that corporate security is more at risk from inside the organisation.

Over two-thirds (69 percent) of Indian businesses believe they are adequately safeguarded against organised cyber-crime (compared to 59 percent of global businesses).

Business impact

Cyber-crime can have a huge impact on a business’s bottom line. Indian businesses believe that loss of revenue (75 percent versus 72 percent of global) ranks the highest. Loss of market capitalisation ranks second.