At the recently concluded ‘State IT Ministers Conclave’ in New Delhi, senior officials had some alarming statistics to share with the Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad.
According to a report by Hindu BusinessLine, 15 crore of the total 230 crore e-transactions that took place last week were compromised. Given the government’s Digital India policy which involves registering over a billion people on a unique ID, Aadhaar, and the subsequent controversy over user privacy, these findings are worrisome.
The report quotes sources highlighting that 40 percent of cyberattacks in India today impact financial and government websites. The most common of these attacks involve phishing, DoS, and ransomware attacks.
According to an official quoted in the report, most of the breaches occur on Gmail accounts, and could be attributed to the fact that ‘the maximum number of internet users (500 million) have smartphones based on Android’.
The report further adds that Union Minister Prasad has asked all state secretaries to monitor web traffic and set up a strong security system and datacenters. In addition to the state of cybersecurity, Aadhaar was also discussed at the conclave, given its significance in the Digital India mission. Prasad said, “We discussed artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies, as they are important for the expansion of the ‘Digital India’ program.”
