New Delhi: Terming the year 2021 as ‘the year of ransomware’, Lt General (Dr) Rajesh Pant, National Cybersecurity Coordinator, Government of India, today cautioned the financial sector to be vigilant amid a surge in cybercrimes and ensure cyber resilience is in place with robust mitigation and recovery techniques.
“The scale of cybercrime is becoming larger and larger. Half the way into this year, one trillion dollars have been paid as ransom, the financial sector absolutely needs to be on the toes and needs to ensure that all the efforts for cyber resilience and mitigation techniques are in place,” he said while speaking at – Pursuit 2021, an event on cybersecurity organised by Internet and Mobile Association of India, with the central theme ‘Combating Financial Frauds with Technology’.
He said that most of the financial sector is dependent on cloud services, with its own data centers, but in terms of ransomware, “it now needs to be very careful”. Firstly, virtual machines for compute or memory for data centers should be distributed into network segments, so network segmentation is very important in case of an attack. Also, outbound traffic should be monitored and security features should be embedded into the cloud aspect. The user level, access policy, should be clearly defined. Two-factor authentication is a must now. Data sanitization, regular cybersecurity audits, server configuration upgrades, are some of the steps to avoid security breaches.
Talking about the country’s cybersecurity strategy, Pant said that it would be a guideline that addresses the entire ecosystem with respect to cybercrimes, capacity building, audits, research and developments, etc. “We are talking of a national cyber space. We are associating an element of sovereignty in it and we are saying how do we create a safe, secure, resilient, trusted and vibrant cyber space for our national prosperity.”
The two-day virtual event on 14th & 15th July will see about 4,000 delegates and over 130 speakers from across the globe. The conference provides an opportunity to directly hear from the Regulators, Enforcement Agencies, Industry experts, CXO of Large Financial Institutions and heads of tech companies, founders of Regtech startups, etc, on their perspective and how they are contributing towards the fight against cybercrimes.
