Seminar on Cyber Security at iLEAD

Seminar on Cyber Security at iLEAD

iLEAD in association with Cyber Defence Firm of the Information Technology Dept. and Folks Deal (an e-commerce company), organized a seminar on Cyber Security. In a digital and cashless India protection of wealth, data and personal information is growing in importance and the seminar enlightened the audience with a complete knowhow on protection from all forms of cyber attacks. The chief guest and speaker for the event was Prof Dipankar Dasgupta, a professor at the University of Memphis and the founding Director of the Centre for Information Assurance. He has more than 200 publications to his name and is also a recipient of Willard R. Sparks Eminent Faculty Award. He is also one of the founding fathers in the field of Artificial Immune Systems. iLEAD Chairman, Mr. Pradip Chopra addressed the audience by mentioning how important the security measures are becoming in the digital economy. The seminar started with a video on India's weak state of cyber security. India is the most hacked country in the world and it is increasingly becoming a haven for cyber criminals due to little or no precaution or action taken. Prof Dasgupta mentioned how India has one of the highest number of cyber attacks in the world and the least amount of cyber defense systems. He continued by explaining how privacy has become a relic of the past and how wealth, information, intellectual property are all vulnerable. Indians form the highest amount of IT workforce in the world, yet India has one of the weakest cyber security. Due to the social media boom, cases of information theft, hacking, stalking and many heinous crimes are on the rise. He mentioned cases of robbery via hacking and how the internet enabled world has already become underworld's marketplace, a hacker's playground and a nation state battleground. Some of the challenges mentioned by him were Understanding Information and Misinformation, how open source news will lose credibility (news will become membership based) and how the world is already being partitioned in the digital space. Immediate precautionary measures like use of multiple accounts instead of one social media account or one mail account interlinked to many electronic platforms (which can be disastrous), checking authenticity of URLS of every website being visited, non disclosure of any sensitive information on social media platforms were also discussed with famous examples. After talking about cyber security programs and course structures at the University of Memphis, he also discussed about the expected market growth in cyber security. Anurag Prasad from Folks deal spoke about the problems of the cashless economy and addressed issues like number of citizens vs number of citizens connected to the internet, availability of reliable internet connectivity, time taken for transactions, battery issues, shutting down of digital wallet remotely and the difficulties of language. Mr. BA Khan from Cyber Defence spoke about How Social Media Accounts are Hacked and how to secure them, some of their achievements like protection of Howrah Police Website, basic concepts of ethical hacking and much more. iLEAD is also introducing a crash course on Cyber Security from February 2017 where students will learn almost all topics in the ambit of Cyber Security. The audience enlightened and aware about the threats in the digital world carried back sufficient amount of knowledge about the cyber security, the most important security above all other security systems today.