At least 2.7 crore Indians got their identities stolen in one way or another in 2020: Norton report

As far as cyber threats are concerned, Indians are one of the most targeted user groups in the world and the Norton Cyber Safety Insights report for 2021has shed some light on exactly what the trouble areas are. As per the Norton report, most Indians were targeted by online identity thefts. While this is not strictly surprising, the numbers put the seriousness into perspective. Norton claims that as per its survey, over 45% of adult internet users in India faced identity theft in 2020. This number is up by almost 40% since 2019 and 2.7 crore Indians were targeted by online identity thefts in 2020 - that’s about 2% of India’s entire population. There’s a more significant number spotted by Norton that’s more concerning. About 59% of all adult internet users in India have faced cybercrime in some form in 2020.

Also, the Norton report does not make it very clear exactly how much financial cost was incurred as a result of these cyber attacks, the report states that Indians spent a total of 1.3 billion hours altogether to resolve cybercrime cases last year - that’s roughly an average of 36.7 hours per person spent per year and more than an hour spent each month. The Norton report also highlights the impact of working remotely has had on cybersecurity. According to the cybersecurity agency, 70% of all adult users in the country are working online without any enterprise-grade security to protect them and have been attacked in the initial months of the pandemic. To be honest, this is not surprising at all since enterprise-grade security solutions are usually expensive and something companies can afford, you really don’t expect people to have that level of security at home.

India as a country was not entirely prepared to take on remote working as the pandemic rolled in, so cybersecurity threats are not surprising in the least including malware attacks, spyware being installed, etc. These make scams and phishing emails look commonplace as hackers take on more sophisticated and advanced breaching methods.