As 2025 takes off, reflections on the cyber attacks of 2024 indicate an alarming surge in cyber threats targeting Indian government agencies and industries across multiple sectors, exposing critical vulnerabilities in the nation’s cybersecurity framework. These attacks ranged from data breaches to ransomware incidents to sophisticated state-sponsored attacks. The lessons from these events serve as a wake-up call and further emphasize the crucial need for organizations to reassess and strengthen their cybersecurity strategies.
India’s Evolving Threat Landscape
The digital risk monitoring platform CloudSEK has revealed India to be the second most targeted nation for cyber attacks globally in its CloudSEK Threat Landscape Report 2024, attributing it to rapid digitization. The report highlighted that the most targeted sector was Banking & Finance, which accounted for 20 victims, followed by the government sector with 13 victims, telecom with 12, and healthcare and pharma with 10 and 9, respectively. On a related note, in the CloudSEK’s Hactivist Activity Analysis, India also witnessed unprecedented cyber attacks in 2024, with more than 4,000 incidents targeting Education, Government, Technology, and Healthcare. The analysis also revealed that website defacement and data breaches were the most prevalent types of attacks. The primary motivations behind these attacks emerged from the Support of Palestine (65.5%), Religious Ideologies (13.3%), and Anti-India Sentiment (12.6%). These hacktivists leveraged DDoS attacks, data leaks, and defacements to disrupt services.
Some of the major incidents that marked the year included one of the telecom operators falling victim to the second data breach within a year, where 278 GB of sensitive user information were accessed and leaked, exposing weaknesses in the organization’s security protocols. A consumer electronics brand also suffered a data breach, compromising the data of 7.5 million customers. An organization in the health Insurance industry also faced a data breach, impacting its 31 million customers. All these and many, many more such incidents across sectors have shaken the confidence of customers, stressing the increase in vulnerabilities in systems across sectors.
Lessons Acquired and Preventive Measures to Be Taken
With India accelerating its digital transformation journey, government agencies and businesses have to prioritize safeguarding their valuable data and critical infrastructure.
- Deployment of Intrusion Detection Systems: Intrusion Detection Systems and Intrusion Prevention Systems act as the first line of defense by constantly scanning the network traffic to identify trouble spots. Advanced Alerting Systems assist in detecting unauthorized access attempts and stop them before any potential damage occurs. Besides monitoring, these systems strengthen the organization’s security posture by discovering vulnerabilities and ensuring regulatory compliance, thereby helping organizations to stay a step ahead. However, cybersecurity teams have to regularly review logs and alerts to ensure all anomalies are addressed on time.
- Employee Awareness and Training: Organizations must prioritize employee awareness, as human error is the main cause of cybersecurity breaches. Security awareness and training are said to be the best defense against evolving cyber threats. They should be taught to identify phishing attempts, suspicious links, malicious attachments, and botnet infections. Employees should have a clear understanding of data protection policies and incident response protocols and know how to respond to potential security incidents while significantly reducing potential damage. Training empowers employees as they become more vigilant and proactive in recognizing potential threats. Investing in employee training also helps organizations to build a security-first culture.
- Strengthening Third-Party Risk Management: A compromised third party can result in a cyber attack on the organization, leading to data exposure and loss. Business operations can be disrupted, introducing financial, compliance, and reputational risks. Organizations should go beyond SLAs and contracts and improve their vendor onboarding process. Besides being compliant, organizations should ensure their third-party vendors are equally compliant by including that in the contractual agreements and commissioning audits to confirm adherence. Any cyber attack on third parties will impact organizations, therefore, they must establish a third-party risk management program and also make it an ongoing exercise.
- Incident Response Planning: To effectively identify and respond to cybersecurity incidents, organizations have to be well prepared, which is possible with an incident response plan that acts as a guide to identify, contain, mitigate, and recover from cyber attacks. This plan should be regularly updated and tested frequently to ensure it is relevant and actionable. To develop an effective incident response plan, organizations have to, at the very outset, create an incident remediation and response policy and formulate an incident response team with each member’s role and responsibilities well-defined. The team should develop playbooks to address the most common types of incidents and put in place an incident response communication plan as well. The team must also ensure the plan is tested and updated frequently. According to the SANS Institute, the 6 steps in properly handling an incident include preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. A well-designed plan is crucial to business resilience and success.
- Investing in Cyber Insurance: As the risk against applications, devices, networks, and users rises, the need for cybersecurity insurance (cyber insurance) is also growing. Cyber insurance product protects organizations from the cost of internet-based threats affecting IT infrastructure, information governance, and policy, which are not covered by traditional insurance products. Cyber insurance safeguards against cyber security risks and offers financial security against damage caused by incidents and the peace of mind that comes along with it. Cyber insurance also covers the litigation costs arising from cyber attacks. It is not wrong to say cyber insurance is a necessity and not a luxury in today’s digital age.
The insights gained in 2024 and the lessons learned will pave the way to address the challenges that lie ahead. With cyber attacks increasing in frequency, sophistication, and complexity, the Indian government and businesses must place top priority on cybersecurity investments and establish a security-first culture. These measures will ensure that the citizens, organizations, and the country’s critical infrastructure remain secured even in the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
The article has been written by Chetan Jain, Managing Director, Inspira Enterprise
