Nifty-50 firms vulnerable to cyber attacks: PwC

MUMBAI: After cleaning up about $80 million from Bangladesh's central bank, hackers may next target top Indian companies and banks as most of them are vulnerable to cyber attacks. According to a research done by PwC India on top 50 listed companies, Nifty 50, most of the companies have information technology weakness that hackers can -if they hadn't already -exploit. Not just IP addresses of these companies have been hacked, even some emails have also been compromised. Hackers have access to 525 email addresses of 34 companies (out of Nifty 50), and can potentially target these companies, the PwC survey said.

In some of the recent high-profile cases of cyber hacking in India, it was seen that hackers tend to enter the company's system after hacking into the email or social networking platform of an employee.

“Attackers can identify and target IT systems of any company by simply using the information available at databases in public domains. While hacking may be a sophisticated work to some extent, with hackers performing active scans on the companies' technolo gy systems and try ing to find weaknes ses in it to break in, not all cybercrimes need this much ef fort,“ said Sivarama Krishnan, leader, cy ber security, at PwC India.

According to the PwC research, sha red exclusively with ET, 34 companies had vulnerabilities on their web proper ties and 200 IP add resses of about 34 companies were blacklisted by internet service provider for being malicious. The research though did not specify which company faced what vulnerability.

As Indian companies continue to see growth, hackers have started targeting them for financial gains, or sometimes, for espionage.

Industry trackers say that only a handful companies have been taking the cyber security seriously.Companies in sectors such as automobiles, consumer goods, energy and media & entertainment have the highest number of vulnerabilities. Although banks and other financial services firms may be little better than others, even they face high number vulnerabilities, the report said.

Hackers tend to collect company data through specialised tools and information, all available in public domain. “With all this information at hand, it's just a matter of selecting appropriate tools to exploit these vulnerabilities. It allows attackers to remain untraced till launching an attack. What's more worrying is that how vital information is available on the internet for public usage -information not only about companies' web presence, but also about the weak links or open doors in it,“ said Krishnan.