Cyber frauds in India may go up in 2021: Kaspersky

New Delhi: With more users getting connected to the Internet and entering the digital payments ecosystem, cyber-fraud incidents may go up in 2021, researcher at cybersecurity firm Kaspersky warned on Monday.

The year 2020 saw several UPI-related frauds and several banks have issued advisories alerting their users about the same.

"As more options for digital payments are introduced, we can see more similar cases in the future," the company said.

In addition to players like Paytm and Google Pay, the crowded Indian digital payments market will now be joined by WhatsApp which recently got approval to start its payments service in a graded manner.

Indian has also been digitising its healthcare sector and the researchers have predicted that this sector is expected to see a rise in cyber attacks during 2021.

Earlier, this year, Greenbone Sustainable Resilience, a German cybersecurity firm reported that medical details of over 120 million Indian patients had been leaked and made freely available on the Internet.

Recently, Dr Reddy's Laboratories also confirmed a ransomware attack.

After a week of this incident, another Indian pharmaceutical company Lupin confirmed an information security incident that has affected multiple internal systems.

The Kaspersky researchers also warned that as lockdown has made many micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to go digital, they will have to take essential steps to protect their customers personal information.

Any loopholes in the setups may provide attackers an opportunity to go after MSMEs, Kaspersky said.

"We live in the world that is so mercurial that it is likely that events and processes will happen in the future that we have not been able to grasp just yet," David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky, said in a statement.

"The amount and complexity of changes we have witnessed that have affected the cyberthreat environment could dictate many scenarios for what is to come ahead."

The researchers said that they have seen ransomware actors like Maze, Cl0p, Nefilmi and Netwalker targeting different industries in India such as financial services, oil drilling services, pharmaceutical, commodity and services providers, automotive supplies, footwear manufacturer, professional and consumer services and manufacturing.

"We expect this tendency to be continued in 2021," the company said.