Your contact number is your only identity today. Not even your Aadhar card or PAN card or voter ID card,” said Rakshit Tandon while delivering a session to the students of MTech in Cyber Security at NorthCap University, Gurugram. He said one’s contact number is his/her only identity because of the one-time password we receive for verification, be it for bank account, Facebook, Whtasapp, PayTM etc.
Tandon, who is the consultant at the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and a cyber security expert, discussed that post demonetisation, there has been a 70 per cent increase in online payments thus making people more vulnerable to cyber attacks. This also resulted in 35 lakh debit cards being hacked. In 75 per cent of the cases in India, the hacked uses social engineering to commit the crime. It refers to using your social media accounts in order to gather personal information to create one’s fake profile. He also shared that India ranks second amongst ransomware attacks in which people hack your data and demand money for the same.
He said that identity theft is a very common threat today in which people create your fake IDs through public information that we share on social media platforms. He advised that only minimum personal information should be shared on public and private both the profiles.
Net banking fraud is another common thing which is happening today. It is also called phishing. In this the hacker creates a fake bank id through which we receive a mail in our inbox. A fake URl is also created in which if we enter our credentials all our personal data would be received by the hacker.