Combating cyber security threats

With cyber security and threats looming large there is a constant need to be aware and equipped to tackle the issue.  The recent demonetisation situation propels ramping up cyber security. Mr Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab – South Asia, Vicente Diaz, Principal Security Researcher, Kaspersky Lab Global Research & Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab, Vikram Kalkat, Business Development Manager, APAC Region Kaspersky Lab tell us more about cyber security threats and solutions.

Can you tell us a little on how to come up with a framework so that cyber breaches are tackled?

Taking an industrial perspective, some countries are already starting with it. Awareness is required and plays an imperative role in it. However, the impression is that it is an IT problem. It is, however, something everybody needs to be a part of and take responsibility. If guidelines are in place it will really help a great deal. For instance, the Reserve Bank of India is a good example of this.

Any figures on the percent of ICS attacked during the last two years?

According to our research figures, the highest of it is seen in China. Iran comes second and there is India on the 3^rd position. The last among these is Malaysia and second last is Japan.

Post the demonetization, there is a lot of use of Pay TM, apps for digital payments among others. How can we safeguard ourselves from falling prey to hacks and other cyber threats? Even email ids and social media accounts for that matter?

Firstly, we must ensure that we keep different passwords for our ids and social media accounts. Also, you could keep a different credit card for digital payments and ensure that isn’t an exorbitant amount of money in it. Also when we download these apps nowadays we tend to give them too much access and too many permissions. People might praise a particular app but you need to ensure that before downloading it you do your research and also check the number of downloads and reviews. Don’t download everything just for the sake of it. Most of us have anti-virus on our laptops but what about our smartphones which we spent so much time on? We must ensure we have anti-virus on our laptops too.