VIJAYAWADA: The sudden spurt in online shopping provides cyber criminals a target rich environment. Conditions akin to Cyber Monday, November 28 this year, (Monday after Thanksgiving) are being created in India with a quantum leap of online transactions forced by a severe dearth of currency caused by the demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes and shortage of change.
People are using mobile apps to make purchases smaller than Rs. 100. More customers buying things means that there are more credit/debit card numbers floating around and most of the customers and companies do not know the importance to verify which website is real and which is not.
In the hurry to do business, companies are likely to be careless about the purchase information they collect. In what can be worse, the IT departments might be forced to cut corners just to keep up with the added load of higher than normal volumes of business.
Kanneganti Ramesh Babu, Director, Research & Strategy eSF Labs Ltd., a cyber security and digital forensics research centre, said that e-commerce is no exception to cyber frauds and people shopping online should be careful about their purchases and data related to bank accounts and cards. "Here, there is no guarantee that the consumers receive the actual product as shown on the e-commerce websites. In the US, e-commerce network is well-established and user data is highly secured giving little scope for online fraudsters," Mr. Ramesh Babu said.
US reports rise in crime
Even in the US e-commerce network, 64 per cent of the business organisations reported an increase in cyber crime in 2015 and 336 per cent increase in phishing links as a prelude to Cyber Monday. The figures for this year’s Cyber Monday are yet to come, but experts are predicting that they will be worse than last year.
For a business, the risk is more because they will be under attack from all directions. While one type of cyber criminals try to use stolen credit card information, the second type try to break into the network and install various types of malware.
