If you are ignoring warnings against cyber frauds, you are at peril. Indian banks have suffered a loss of Rs 6,600 crore through cyber frauds during January-August period this year, according to Internet security solutions firm Norton.
The losses are going up significantly. “The losses suffered by the banks have gone up by 88 per cent over the comparable period,” David Hall, Product Marketing (Asia-Pacific) of Norton, has said, quoting an E&Y fraud report.
The losses suffered by individual users are much more. Nearly one-third of all the 13.7 crore Internet users have become victims of cyber crime. “The average cost per user (in terms of loss, clean-up costs) is put at Rs 10,000 per victim, adding up to Rs 42,000 crore,” he said.
Talking on the growing incidence of cyber crime and identity thefts here, he referred to the cyber attack on a pizza chain in India that had left details about 37,000 users exposed. “About 15,000 Web sites were defaced and 712 security incidents reported, with 44 per cent of them being phishing (similar looking Web sites),” he said.
He was here to launch security solutions for mobile devices and Norton 360, the multi-platform multi-device product.
David Hall said the firm has noticed that 1.15 lakh victims fell prey for some kind of cyber crime every day, taking the annualised number to 4.2 crore. The spread of social media was making matters worse.
“Users do not care to log out from their accounts after a session. A good number of them are not aware of profile settings that can help them in restricting access to their accounts,” he said.