Now that we are in the third week of December, year 2024 will end in two weeks. In this column, I am going to talk about few statistics, incidents and types of major cyber crimes that haunted Indians this year and the steps taken by the Government of India to prevent or curb cyber crimes. I have written at length about those types of cyber crimes in the past, which you can read them in this blog website.
According to a report, cyber crime grew at a rate of 15% globally in 2024 and is now a USD 9.5 trillion industry, which is more than double the amount of India’s GDP in 2024. According to the Indian Cyber Crime Co-ordination Centre (I4C), the reported loss due to cyber crime in India till September was Rs 11,333 crore, while the actual amount is two to three times this as most cases are not reported for various reasons. According to the same report, in terms of reported cyber crimes, stock trading related cyber crimes occupy the top place, causing a loss of Rs 4,636 crore to the common man. In the next place is investment-related cyber crimes, causing a loss of Rs 3,216 crore to the people. The third place goes to digital arrest cyber crime, causing a loss of Rs 1,616 crore to the people. According to the same I4C report, our state of Karnataka tops the list of states that lost most money in the country, losing Rs 2,047.2 crore to various cyber crimes in the first nine months of this year, which is 137% more than last year. Bharatpur in Rajasthan and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh are the favorite centers of cyber crimes in 2024, pushing Nuh in Haryana and Jamtara in Jharkhand to the third and fourth positions.
The above-reported numbers are alarming, and in response, the Indian government has taken several steps to prevent cybercrime in the past year. The most important of which are – 6.69 lakh SIM cards and 1.32 lakh mobile phones (IMEIs) used for cybercrime have been blocked in the first nine months of this year, along with 1700 Skype and 59 thousand WhatsApp accounts. Banks and other financial institutions have been prepared a cybercriminal suspect list, with the help of which more than 5.6 lakh suspicious financial transactions have been blocked in the first nine months of this year, which has prevented Rs 1400 crore from going to cybercriminals. In addition, private company Airtel has blocked 8 billion spam phone calls and 800 million suspicious messages with the help of AI-based programs and has given warning messages about suspicious calls to 252 million customers in last couple of months which has prevented many cybercrimes from happening.
The list of major cybercrime incidents in 2024 includes the theft of 230 USD million from WazirX crypto exchange, the theft of millions of customer data from BSNL and the theft of 75 lakh customer data from Boat India’s servers and auctioning it on the internet occupy the second position. The ransomware attack on Motilal Oswal and Poly Cabs is at the third position in the list of cybercrime incidents. According to the data, social engineering cybercrime continues to be at the top of the list of major cybercrime incidents in India in 2024, followed by trading and investment-related cybercrime at the second position and the new cybercrime of digital arrest occupies the third position.
In the next column, I am going to predict some of the major types of cybercrimes that may impact common people in 2025 and from the learnings in 2024, what are some of the precautionary steps one can take to prevent oneself being a victim of a cybercrime.