Emerging and Future Trends: “Prevention is better than cure”
Post Edward Snowden event it seems the sector of cyber-security is getting very active in India and elsewhere. India came up with its National Cyber Security policy in middle of 2013 and now IIIT Delhi is launching its Cyber-security Education and Research Center later this month. In this blog post we want to focus on the trends which are putting pressure on governments/academia to come up with policy and research plan in order to prepare the country from future threats!
There are 3 important trends that world is experiencing right now and we need to plan in advance for the emerging security threats for them:
- Rising mobile Internet and apps: While the Internet accessed through websites had a security threat we know as phishing attack for Internet banking users. One can imagine that the growing usage of mobile apps for banking sector would lay a similar threat on the security front whether it is mobile malware or an infected application.
- Rise of social networking sites: India currently has 90 Million users using Facebook which is more than 60% of the Indian Internet users. Social networking sites primarily provide virality to content and social context (including trust). For a malware to spread sites like Facebook/Twitter etc remain as potent medium with a devastating impact.
- Organized cybercrime: In last decade we have seen example of the Estonian cyber attacks (in 2007) bringing the entire country down for several days. Several leading companies from US losing sensitive information of millions of their customers like credit card data and account passwords. (link1, link2, link3). Most of these incidents are not an act of an individual but they involved careful planning by an organized set of criminals.
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
