When not if.
“When.”
If you’re an Indian, your identity and personal information are most probably going to be hacked, leaked or breached in the coming years. It’s just a question of when it happens, not if.
Perhaps some of your data has already leaked and you just don’t know it yet. Maybe it’s among the 10 million vehicle owners or 34 million subsidised food recipients in Kerala? Or among the 3.2 million debit card holders? Or the 100-120 million Reliance Jio mobile users? Perhaps the 17 million Zomato users or the 2.2 million McDonald’s ones? The 130 million Aadhaar users whose data was accidentally leaked?
Identity thieves took out a big loan in the name of the CEO of $10.5 billion Securitas, one of the world’s largest security companies, and then declared him bankrupt. Let me repeat that—the CEO of a security company that employs nearly 3 lakh people around the world had to step down from company boards because identity thieves declared him bankrupt.
So, remember, it’s when, not if. The sooner you accept that reality, the better.
The Hockey Stick Hypothesis
The average Indian has nearly 80 apps on her phone. The majority are cloud-based online services—cheap to build but tough to secure. Ninety-four percent of all cloud applications are not enterprise-ready in terms of security, said a report last year by netskope.
You may wonder why breaches keep happening irrespective of assurances of “Your data is safe” by the organisations to whom you entrust your data.
A simple explanation is that most organisations have neither the means nor motivation to secure your data. Online startups are in the early stages of their lives focused more on surviving, rather than spending their limited time and money on security best practices. Unless of course, they are in banking or fintech, where security standards like PCI DSS are mandatory for starting operations.
Once businesses get past survival, their focus turns to rapid growth and scaling. Again, security is an afterthought. The famous “hockey stick curve” is what most businesses go all out for. Caution is thrown to the winds as growth is chased at all costs. Issues start popping up. And these issues start getting noticed and reported during the consolidation phase that follows the growth phase when the businesses start looking at unit economics. Hence most breaches occur (or to be more accurate, are noticed or widely reported) during the consolidation phase that follows the growth phase businesses.
And if that wasn’t enough, the use of “super keys” like mobile number and universal ID Aadhaar makes it easier for hackers to join together data from various breaches to construct a fine-grained view of the digital footprints of victims.
