'Most Indian firms unprepared for hacking risks'

As hackers evolve new mechanisms to infiltrate into systems, 61 per cent Indian enterprises say the risk of cyber attacks is stalling their digitalisation progress, a new report said on Wednesday.

Moreover, 52 per cent of Indian organizations think that cybersecurity is the responsibility of their cloud service provider, said a study by leading cybersecurity firm Forcepoint prepared along with Frost & Sullivan.

The study revealed that 95 per cent of organizations have embarked on a digital transformation journey in India. 

However, for those that have begun executing their digital transformation projects, 46 per cent of them have encountered a security incident and 20 per cent didn't conduct breach assessment regularly in the last 12 months. 

In fact, only 18 per cent respondents thought about cyber security at the early stages of the digital transformation projects while 70 per cent of organizations think about cyber security only at the latter stages of the projects.

"It's clear that many APAC organizations are on the back foot when it comes to enterprise cybersecurity in the borderless organization," said Kenny Yeo, Industry Principal, APAC ICT, Frost & Sullivan. 

The study found that 69 per cent of Indian organizations are at risk with 44 per cent of them having encountered data breach before and 25 per cent of them not performing any breach assessment in the last 12 months. 

Among the biggest group of respondents, BFSI and IT services and BPO emerged as the top sectors to perform regular breach assessment to ensure there was no security incident in the company.

"Adopting a behaviour-centric security approach that focuses on understanding users' behaviour on the network and within applications to identify behavioural anomalies can mitigate cyber attacks before they happen," said Alvin Rodrigues, senior director and security strategist at Forcepoint Asia Pacific.