In our hi-tech and digitized environment a report from New York later widely followed in Indian media that ‘the details from more than 500 million Facebook users have been found available on a website for hackers,' has caused a serious concern if not a panic among many institutions of strategic importance and corporates alike in India.
If so, then it is worrying that a vast amount of information shared on Facebook and other social media sites have been hacked or shared openly and it also raises the question as to how secure that information is that we unmindfully share with all such social media platforms.
What is more alarming is the claim that it has information from 106 countries including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, and email addresses.
People often come across the stories in media of duping through social media platforms when their personal information was either hacked or shared by them with impersonators. The most popular social portal Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. In 2018, the social media giant disabled the feature that allowed users to search for one another via phone number following revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information on up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.
A fortnight back only, the Lok Sabha was informed that over 15.5 lakh cybersecurity incidents had been reported in the last two years and 11.58 lakh of them were recorded in 2020 alone.
Union Minister of State for Home had shared the information that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is serving as the national agency for responding to cybersecurity incidents in accordance with the provisions of Section 70-B of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
According to the information reported to and tracked by the CERT-In, 3,94,499 and 11,58,208 cybersecurity incidents were observed during 2019 and 2020, respectively, he said in a written reply to a question.
The official version says that when CERT-In receives inputs from its situational awareness systems and threat intelligence sources about malware infections in networks of entities across sectors. Whenever any incident comes to the notice of CERT-In, it issues alerts and advisories to the entities concerned and sectoral Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) for remedial measures.
Recently, the Union Information Technology Minister has claimed that the government was alive to such threats and doing all its best to ensure a more secure digital environment in a country like India that aspires to become the Digital Power in the world in future. People here have no option but to put faith in the official assurances.
