Cyber Crime Among Top 3 Economic Crimes in India

By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 21 December 2011, 00:25 IST
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Cyber Crime Among Top 3 Economic Crimes in India

Bangalore: Cyber Crime is escalating in India, reveals the Global Economic Crime Survey, 2011 conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. This survey based on 4,000 well-informed people across the globe, reveals that cyber crime ranks among the top 4 economic crimes of the world and is third on the list of economic crimes in India.

The survey highlights the following points: 40 percent of the respondents were afraid to admit to cyber crimes within their organization because of threat to reputation of the concerned company, 2 out of 5 respondents said that they did not receive any training regarding cyber safety, one-fourth of the respondents said that there was no regular formal review done by their CEOs regarding cyber crime and majority of the respondents said that they were not aware of a cyber-crisis policy within their organization. The report also generated the following points: 34 percent of the respondents is said to have experienced economic crime in the past year, about 1 in 10 had suffered losses of about $5 million, 56 percent of the respondents attributed cyber crimes to insiders and Suspicious Transaction Monitoring was the most efficient method of detection of fraud (from 5 percent in 2009 to 15 percent in 2011).

The level of fraud in India has increased from 18 percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2011. This steep rise in cyber-crimes has been attributed to the increased use of social networking sites, cell phones, laptops, wi-fi networks and wireless connections in workplaces. It was also said that lack of responsibility on the part of top-level management regarding cyber-crimes has led to an increase in cyber-crimes in offices. The Cisco Connected World Technology Report states that about 80 percent of the respondents in India break the IT regulations on their companies. According to the Cisco Report; U.S., Russia, China, Australia and U.K. seemed to have a higher rate of defying IT regulations.

Some safety measures given by the survey are:  knowing one’s human assets (staff, partners, suppliers and agents); aligning IT, Internal Audit Team and Board of Directors in case of cyber crimes; conducting regular fraud risk assessments; having a cyber-savvy CEO for cultural impact and having a cyber crisis response plan.