NCDC and NEDAC organized a webinar on “Cyber Risks and Mitigation” on Monday, in which Dr Gulshan Rai who is Senior Adviser NCDC and who served as Chief of Cybersecurity in the Indian Prime Minister’s office till recently, was the Key Resource Person.
Besides Rai, several prominent persons including RBI Board member Satish Marathe and NCDC Managing Director Sundeep Nayak participated in the Webinar which discussed a host of issues related to Cyber Security in times of the Covid 19 outbreak.
An invitation sent by the NCDC for those interested to participate read “It’s a free program for NEDAC members and their associates. AARDO is specially invited to participate.”
For making it easy for one to join the Webinar, NCDC MD explained how to register oneself for the webinar and said that the Webinar would be on Zoom video conference software, which is simple and easy to download and use on smartphones, laptops, desktops, iPads, notebooks etc.
The subject of the Webinar was chosen as cooperatives increasingly use the internet to do businesses, said MD of cooperative lender NCDC. This has led to greater risks and co-operatives must be trained to tackle cyber threat.
Devoid of resources, it has generally been found that co-operatives fall prey to Cyber crooks who execute their nefarious designs rather easily to cheat cooperatives, felt experts participating in the Webinar.
Dr Gulshan Rai, Senior Adviser NCDC highlighted the common ploys employed by hackers in cheating co-operators digitally. Rai also replied to queries raised in the Webinar.
Readers would recall how one of the leading cooperative banks, Pune based Cosmos Cooperative Bank fell victim to a concerted attack by Cyber crooks who operated from several countries globally.
“Cosmos is a big bank and thus you came to know about the heist but there are several small co-op banks who fall prey to Cyberattacks and go unreported”, said one of the participants.
Appreciating the NCDC initiative for organizing a relevant and timely Webinar, co-operators feel that there is an urgent need to sensitize cooperatives to cyber risks being carried out against them on a massive scale. “Internet, whether you like it or not, has become part of everyday life and the smarter you grow in handling it safely, the better”, they added.