Indian organizations need to prioritize cybersecurity ahead of the festive season

Over the last eighteen months, around 81% of global organizations experienced increased cyber threats while 77% of Indian organizations has experienced a downtime due to cybersecurity issues during the peak festive season.

Further, while the top three most threatening cyber risks that were detected are malware attacks (47%), data breaches (43%), ransomware and cloud jacking (33% each), according to a recent report by McAfee Enterprise and FireEye.

Meanwhile, over 30% of the IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their IoT devices.

According to IT professionals in India, holidays have been the most challenging peak periods for cybercrimes as 52% of them indicated festive holidays such Diwali, Ramadan, Christmas as the peak period.

Furthermore, 32% of them pointed at bank holidays, and 12% of them at summer vacations in schools and colleges. During these “peak” periods, professionals find maintaining a fully staffed security team difficult.

“It is imperative that all business of scale evaluate and prioritize security technology to keep them protected, especially during peak seasons like the holidays,” Bryan Palma, CEO, McAfee Enterprise, said.

As the holiday and festive season in India has already commenced, 91% of the IT professionals anticipate a moderate or even substantial impact by increased demand for their products and services, McAfee reported.

“Cyberattacks tend to skyrocket in India during the holiday season as we tend to spend more time online and often let our guard down. Taking advantage of this, bad actors adopt newer techniques and sophisticated means to target businesses when they’re most vulnerable,” Venkat Krishnapur, managing director, McAfee Enterprise, India, said.

Further, to take additional security precautions, 69% of the organizations are implementing new software solutions, and 61% of them are shooting up their employee trainings.