State of Cyber Security – 2020

A long-awaited webinar on “State of Cyber Security” was held on 15th August 2020. The eminent
speaker of the talk was Mr. Subhajit Deb. He is currently serving as Chief Information Security
Officer at Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, also a Data Privacy Leader with 18+ years of enriching
cyber-security experience. He shared impeccable insights about the pillars of the cybersecurity
domain. To laud, he also has “Multiple US Patent” and won several awards including the Top
100 CISO’s.

He began by explaining “World Economic Forum” in 2019 has charted cybersecurity as a
topmost ongoing global risk. The number of cyber breaches against businesses at the present
time has doubled in the last five years. The most targeted area for the attackers is healthcare
which is about (27.5%) followed by government data, retail, financial services, technology, and
education. While talking about the recent global and India data breach, he gave a few insights like-
the average cost of an individual breach which a business faces are $3.92M (global) and $12.9M
(India). Over 11.7B person records had been stolen globally over the past 3 years and
35,636 average records stolen per Indian data breach. Globally, it takes 204 days and 221 days in
India to detect a breach; he later explained that organizations must operate under the notion that
there is a possibility that their systems can be attacked or sabotaged at any time. This will
facilitate an organization to focus heavily on detection, prevention, response and recovery,
thereby improving how quickly one can recover from an event.

Then he explained about the “Key Drivers” of cyber threats wherein he spoke about India’s
forthcoming “Data protection bill” and European market General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR). The speaker was explicating with four key trends in the Indian market: Unsafe User
Practice– users are the weakest link, who make a breach possible unconsciously, Malicious
Insiders– the traitors, Digital Extortion using ransomware and fraud, Work from Home (WFH)
and remote threats. Later, the speaker advanced the talk to the next level, with stating “Cyber
Security as a Career”, he glittered that there’s always a requirement of skilled cybersecurity
professionals. He applauded that SCIT is guiding students correctly in the field of cybersecurity.
The penultimate part of his talk was explaining the roles and responsibilities offered throughout
the industries. At last, during Question and Answer (Q&A) Session he responded, all the queries,
proposed learning, acquiring new skills to inspire students and the ultimate goal to build a proper
skill-set to fulfil the need of the cybersecurity profession.