India faces high impact of hacking in APAC region: Report

New Delhi, Jan 21 (SocialNews.XYZ) India is most likely to have "high" impact (58 per cent) of cybersecurity incidents on the business compared to Singapore (42 per cent) and Australia (16 per cent), a new report said on Tuesday.

The report by cloud cybersecurity company McAfee revealed that an enterprise faced up to 120 data breaches on an average in the past year, with the respondents across Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, estimating an average loss of $298,812.

Interestingly, when asked whether they could put a cost on their recent cyber incidents, Indian organizations led with 91 per cent believing that they were able to quantify the financial impact.

Owing to high hacking risk, 93 per cent organisations in India believe they are cyber-resilient, taking the top position among all the other countries in the APAC region.

"Organizations in India are most likely to have 'high' impact of cybersecurity incidents. Therefore, involvement of cybersecurity in digital transformation at the management level becomes critical in more developed jurisdictions such as India, where regulation and compliance are evolving and, therefore, may be more of a focus for organisations," explained Sanjay Manohar, Managing Director, McAfee India.

Organisations in India describe their culture of cybersecurity as either "strategic" (60 per cent) or "embedded" (33 per cent).

The survey covered 480 cybersecurity decision-makers across eight Asia-Pacific countries including Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand.

It revealed that 97 per cent of the organizations in India were familiar with the concept of cyber-resilience compared to Australia (73 per cent) and New Zealand (75 per cent).

"Nearly 98 per cent Indian enterprises are likely to invest more in security due to regulation, despite the maturity of their jurisdiction," the findings showed.

Data breach (62 per cent), data tampering (49 per cent) and fraud (43 per cent), were predicted to be the top three risks enterprises will be prone to in 2021.

Investment in categories such as data protection, cloud protection technology and network protection technology were top priorities for enterprises targeting an "optimized" cybersecurity maturity posture.

"As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, cybersecurity is fast becoming an integral part of digital transformation, with 49 per cent 'extremely' involved and 41 per cent 'very involved' in the digital transformation process," said the report.

Data breach (62 per cent), data tampering (49 per cent) and fraud (43 per cent), were predicted to be the top three risks enterprises in 2021.

The findings also show that in 2021, new risks will spread through a range of other potential issues such as an increase in fraud (23 per cent - 30 per cent) and defacement (24 per cent - 28 per cent).

Larger organizations were prone to more cyber incidents but organizations with more than 500 staff suffered an average of 209 incidents, which is almost 8 times higher than businesses with 50 to 100 employees, said the report.

Source: IANS