Cybercrime, fraud, bribery key concerns for firms: Survey

MUMBAI: Rising risks around cybercrime, internal fraud, bribery and corruption have been "key concerns" for Indian organisations over the past two years, according to a recent study.

The EY 2016 Global Forensic Data Analytics Survey says that 40 per cent of its Indian respondents are concerned about cybercrime.

83 per cent said they use forensic data analytics (FDA) when investigating internal frauds, and 75 per cent said they deployed FDA tools and techniques for early fraud detection, the report said.

"Cybercrime is perceived as the fastest growing fraud risk (40 per cent), followed by bribery and corruption (36 per cent) in India. 80 per cent of the respondents stated that management's awareness of the benefits of FDA in the company's anti-fraud program needs to improve while globally, this stood lower at 68 per cent," Arpinder Singh, Partner and National Leader, Fraud Investigation and Dispute Services, EY said.

EY belives that FDA can have a significant impact on growing threats such as internal fraud, cybercrime, corruption, and money laundering.

"Companies need to proactively intertwine it within their anti-fraud programmes," Singh said.

The survey revealed that businesses need to cope with a host of reforms driven by both risk factors and regulations.

Further, companies would need to use FDA techniques to proactively counter risks like effectively analyzing their internal data sets (network traffic, emails, logs) to identify threats based on historic data, learn and then improve their IT systems and controls, the report suggested.

In India, 66 per cent of respondents are spending at least half their FDA budget proactively which is higher than globally (63 per cent).

"We believe this proactive stance is a result of greater regulatory enforcement concerns, improved surveillance analytics and compliance monitoring offerings in the market," the report said.

The global survey had 665 participants across 17 countries, and was conducted between June and September 2015.