Cyber Security: How secure India is?

The recent hacking of Twitter handles of famous personalities of US has brought back the question of cyber security in the digital world. On Wednesday, Twitter accounts of some people were hacked under a crypto currency scam. The affectd ones included former US President Barack Obama, runners for election Joe Biden Jr. and Kanye West, millionaires Elon Musk and Bill gates, Kim Kardashian and many others.

Consequently, Twitter blocked the accounts and started to fix up things, however, it was quite late. The account number attached with the tweets received $ 100,000 from over 300 transactions. Although, Twitter managed to fix the issue, the questions are still upright. The biggest one being, is it possible to have 100 percent cyber security in this digital world?

Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues.

— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020

India has had its own share in cyber-attacks. In 2016, the Twitter handle of Indian National Congress’ (INC) leader Rahul Gandhi was hacked along with INC’s official Twitter handle.

India was in deep crisis after a ransomware named WannaCry was hacking ATMs across the world in 2017.

2018 saw UIDAI Aadhar software hack and which revealed that personal data of 1.1 billion users was being sold.

In May 2019, the official website of Bhartiya Janta Party was hacked. Later in the same year, October 2019, an Israeli spyware was detected in mobile phones of journalists and activists.

In 2020, as the pandemic has spread over the world, India has been on high risk of hacking. Director General of Indian Computer Emergency response Team, Sanjay Bahl says that healthcare and educational system are being targeted by Pakistan and China. It is the need of the hour to not only strengthen the cyber security, but also educate people about it.

Written By Rashi, She is doing her Masters in Convergent Journalism from Jamia AJK MCRC, New Delhi.

You can connect with Ground Report on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, and mail us at [email protected] to send us your suggestions and writeups