The pandemic has left thousands of people jobless. The situation brought economic crisis due to which many of the employees were dismissed and the salary of the remaining employees were lowered. People could not actually sustain in such a situation. Many decided to start up their own businesses. India witnessed several youngsters coming up with new ideas and finding success in their business. People coming from foreign countries started to settle in their homeland by investing in large companies or setting up a firm in large scale. In either ways the graph of new start-ups in India has increased dramatically after the pandemic.
When people were focussing on the profit, they gave less importance to cyber security due to which many of the start-ups became vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Before entering into a new business, we should always give priority to security.
Today, India is witnessing hype in cyber activities against newly formed companies by exploiting their vulnerabilities. People today are neglecting the fact that the security strategy should be given equal importance as the business strategy.
Most of the business start-ups nowadays aim at exponential boom rather than implementing a safe online business model.
Indian organizations have been continuously facing data breaches which leaked millions of credit card informations, identities and personal datas.
During the announcement of lockdown, organizations and business went completely isolated and they had to send all the employees to work from home. This resulted in the access of company information from different networks. This situation was utilized by the cyber hackers. They easily hacked the employee using an open vulnerability, through which they got access to the organization’s data.
The major established companies that faced cyber-attacks during the time of pandemic are BigBasket, Juspay, White Hat Jr, Unacademy etc. A total of 50 million records were abducted from these organizations.
When cyber hacks against large scale companies became major headlines in news channels, several small scale companies which went completely bankrupt due to malware and ransomware attacks were left unnoticed.
The major plus points of Indian companies are their ‘immediately incident response’. Once they have been under a cyber-attack, they immediately issue public statements, give explanation about what went wrong and take necessary steps to overcome them.
Even though this is a positive step, we must ensure to prevent cyber-attacks in the first place. This can only be possible through a combined effort like conducting security audits, ensuring protection and having early detection software.
According to the statistics of World Economic Forum, the only thing the CEO’s of different organization around the world is feared of, is cyber security. In 2020, start-up companies in India witnessed cyber-attacks which resulted in the loss of 2 million informations. Compared to the previous year, there has been an increase of 9.4%
When a data breach occurs in a company, it first affects the reputation of the organization and will have an adverse impact on their balance sheet. Considering the case of BigBasket, they lost around 20 million user information and the hackers sold them for 40,000 dollars in the darknet.
Start-up companies usually store informations in a single huge database. Some may be protected whereas some may not be. Such databases can be a target for the cyber criminals and a small data breach can cause huge destruction for these companies.
How to prevent start-up businesses from cyber-attacks?
Secure the servers
One of the main drawbacks of start-up companies is not properly protecting their servers like AWS, Azure, Google etc. Their misconfigured servers could lead to the access of secret passwords which open the doors to millions of records.
Conduct regular security audits
Since the attack strategies are changing day by day, advanced cyber-attacks are becoming undetectable. Hackers just enter into the systems, steal information and vanish. In order to patch up this situation, regular audits should be performed. Vulnerabilities need to be checked and uncover them before the hacker does.
Install strong cyber security software
There are authentic and secure cyber security softwares available in the market. Choose any one of them and install them in every system. They will help you to detect the presence of malware and to block them.