Last year in 2024, cyber intrusions in India surpassed those in the US, Russia, Ukraine and Germany combined, accounting for 12 per cent of total hacking attacks (over 39 per cent) in the Asia-Pacific region. Not only this, India is among the top ten countries with cases involving, phishing, data leakage and those of criminals operating through the dark web.
According to the High-Tech Crime Trends report released by the cybersecurity firm, Group-IB, these security breaches occurring in India can be attributed to regional tensions between the country and its neighbouring nations. Pro-Palestinian hacktivist groups, too, have often aimed at India due to “its diplomatic stance and increasingly close relationship with Israel”.
To make matters worse, AI has provenly accelerated these attacks. Although artificial intelligence is often used by cybersecurity experts to detect crime, it also provides offenders with more advanced techniques to steal data, conduct cyber espionage, and breach corporate networks.
“Ransomware attacks saw an increase of 10 per cent over 2023, with renewed attacks on the manufacturing, real estate, and professional services,” said Group-IB CEO, Dmitry Volkov. According to Volkov, advanced persistent threats have grown “more elusive” with the evolution of technology.
As per the report, in 2024, over a thousand new instances were detected of “data being leaked into the public domain” worldwide. These incidents compromised more than 6.4 billion user data strings. The countries most affected were the US, followed by Russia and India.
“Anything that exposes a user's identity, is severely threatening,” said Ruchin Kumar, vice president for the South Asian region at Futurex (a company specialising in data encryption solutions). “AI is just as dangerous. It exacerbates the problem by equipping the attackers with better capabilities.”
As time progresses, these crimes “will evolve and become increasingly severe”, he added.
The September 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) severely disrupted the company’s digital services (though core transport operations, including buses and trains, remained unaffected). The breach exposed the bank details of approximately 5,000 customers; the financial impact exceeded an amount worth 30 million euros.
According to Kumar, encrypting data “is the best practice” to secure data. Encrypting data transforms readable information (plain text) into an unreadable format (ciphertext), making it secure and accessible only to those with the decryption key.
“The encryption keys, therefore, would need periodic rotation, necessitating regular updates to the encrypted keys,” he explained. “The decryption keys, however, should only be made accessible to the owner of that certain ‘critical data’.”
