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Follow UsMuntazir Abbas
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Believe it or not, but cybercrime is apparently becoming a weapon for criminals to make money and also wage war on many countries.
From the Sony hacking case to the most recent attack on Gmail, and also umpteen credit card frauds and other such criminal activities, cyber attacks in different manifestations have become a mode of war that underscore the political as well as financial aspect of the crime.
The enterprise segment is highly vulnerable to cyber heists and the potential targets include BFSI, education, government and IT services, says KnowBe4, an Internet Security Awareness Training (ISAT) provider, in a study.
According to a Security trends report by Symantec, the web has created a plethora of opportunities for devious attackers to steal information, misuse computers and infect systems with malicious software. Numerous groups and organizations are active in the trade of fraudulent goods and services in this online ‘underground economy’.
The majority of these groups function through Web-based forums devoted to online fraud, the report notes.
“In the past, hackers had to create their own threats from scratch. This complex process limited the number of attackers to a small pool of highly skilled cybercriminals,” said Shantanu Ghosh, Vice President, India Product Operations, Symantec. “Today’s attack tool kits make it relatively easy for even a malicious novice to launch a cyberattack. As a result, we expect to see even more criminal activity in this area and a higher likelihood that the average user will be victimized.”
Speaking to CIOL, Hugh Njemanze, who is one of the co-founders of ArcSight and vice president and CTO of security solutions at Hewlett-Packard, said that over the last few years, the interest and relevance for security in large enterprises have been growing significantly in the backdrop of the increased cyberattacks for financial gains.
"In ten years from now, perhaps the dollar value of cybercrime will be more than the dollar value of traditional legacy crime," observed Njemanze. He believes that cybercrime has grown manifold, and it has become imperative for organizations to look at it and act accordingly.
ArcSight sees value preposition in HP
ArcSight, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in October 2010, is collaborating with the latter in research and development. The company is contributing to HP's cloud offering with its security innovations.
"HP has a large customer base, though we have our own sales force. With this association, we get access to more accounts," the company said. As the organizations are increasingly adopting Web 2.0, ArcSight provides monitoring capabilities to them and help users to identify threats.
India a potential market for ArcSight
The company started its operations in the country during 2008. "We have a suite of products for cloud deployment while HP itself is a cloud promoter and we see a lot of potential and growth in India," told Ranndeep Singh Chonker, regional sales director (India) at ArcSight.
Chonker said that government, telecom and BFSI are their focus areas and they have successfully deployed their security solution at WNS BPO recently. ArcSight is also expected to increase its SMB partner base by the end of 2011 in India.