siliconindia | | SEPTEMBER 20228HOW INDIAN EDUCATION ECOSYSTEM CAN LEARN FROM THE WESTERN CYBERSECURITY CURRICULUM?By Rakesh Kharwal, Managing Director - India/South Asia & ASEAN, Cyberbitf you have to paint the story of India over the past couple of years, reforms are surely going to come about with flying colors. Perhaps, re-forms that have digital technologies deep-rooted within them. For us, as Indians, the yesteryears have marked a transition from feature phones to smartphones, from cash to digital payments, from TV broadcasts to on-the-go entertainment, and in fact, even from physical learning classes to the e-learning ones.Every individual transition has added considerable value to our day-to-day life-styles, thereby making us more efficient and productive as a nation. A wide variety of reforms have also been seen in the field of education including the formation of `In-stitutes of Eminence', research fellowships, more IITs and IIMs across India, and so on. However, there is a missing piece in the block. Cybersecurity: The Need to Secure India's Mounting Digital Frontier!According to the latest figures available (iCUBE 2018 report), there were more than 566 million internet us-ers in India by the end of December 2018 ­ registering a whopping growth rate of 18 percent during the year. It is estimated that this figure will rise to 627 million by December 2019. Out of the current user base, 493 million Indians are regular internet users with 293 million dwellings in urban India and 200 million living across rural geographies. It needs to be specifically noted that 97 per-cent use a mobile phone as one of the de-vices to access the internet.It goes without saying that a majority of this growing crowd of netizens com-prises first-time internet users. So, they are vulnerable to even the most basic forms of cyber attacks including email phish-ing, social engineering attacks, and so on. This is when even the people familiar with the internet and digital technologies are not aware of the wide-ranging perils that are inherent to the digital infrastructure. By 2021, a report by Cyber-security Ventures suggests that the global economy will experience losses worth $6 trillion due to cybercrimes and exploits. This is because of the burgeoning digi-tal infrastructure and the rapid adoption of embryonic technologies without adequate fail-safes. There is a dire As a former country manager for IBM security software, Rakesh Kharwal has got more than a decade of expertize working in the cybersecurity domain. He has also worked for various other IT giants including Microsoft.Rakesh KharwalIN MY OPINIONI
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