The cybersecurity skills shortage India faces, in charts

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G20 summit are yet another reminder of the growing and ever-present threat to digital security. In fact, several hackers are likely to have attacked India's digital infrastructure during the summit, claims CloudSEK, a cyber-security company. Between 2020 and 2022, India averaged 1.3 million cybersecurity incidents a year, according to data presented in Parliament based on incidents reported to or tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a government nodal agency.

The actual number could be higher. Additionally, almost 67% of Indian government and essential service entities reported a 50% increase in disruptive cyberattacks in 2022-23, says a new report by Palo Alto Networks, a US-based cybersecurity company. Cyberattacks entail a financial cost.

Last year, the Official Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures projected this cost globally at $8 trillion for 2023 and $10.5 trillion by 2025. The average cost of a data breach in India this year has been $2.18 million, according to IBM's annual Cost of a Data Breach Report. According to the report, 28% of these data breaches led to the loss of data spanning multiple types of environments, such as public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises, indicating that attackers were able to compromise multiple environments while avoiding detection.

In 2020, India took an average 230 days to identify a breach, and another 83 days to contain it, compared to 186 and 51 days in the US, and 128 and 32 days in Germany. For India, the cost of cyberattacks is critical, given its digital ambitions. The number of internet users is expected to grow from 692 million in 2022 to 900 million by 2025, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.