Cybersecurity is India's Achilles heel

The media is abuzz with reports of India’s quest to go digital and cashless. Are we ready to go fully digital? Never mind that only 17% of Indians own smartphones, and that mobile data costs money. Forget that poverty, illiteracy and lack of awareness is staggering, but the biggest issue is cybersecurity.  Have our banks, telecom service providers, mobile phone-makers ensured security of our bank accounts, digital wallets, OTP delivery mechanism and privacy of the transactions? Has the government passed adequate cyber security laws and adopted cyber policies to ensure that a customer is not responsible for cybertheft of his/her funds? Do we have the customer service culture in place for helping victims of cybertheft? In my opinion, the answer to all these are in the negative. On October 20, we found out that 3.4 million debit card accounts were compromised with what could be a case of ATM hacking. Reported cybercrime incidents shot up from 13,301 in 2011 to 3,00,000 in 2015, according to an Assocham report. Unless legally bound, most cybercrimes remain unreported as companies do not divulge their weak defence against cyberbreaches. According to the same report, 72% of financial services and insurance companies surveyed admitted to being victimised by cyberattacks in 2015.