Cybercrime has become a dominant peril and is continuously increasing despite strong measures enforced by authorities. The number of incidents have demonstrated a staggering 217% growth over past five years, moving from 10.29 lakh cases in 2022 to 28.15 lakh in 2025, with last year’s growth being 24.11%. Currently, these crimes translate to a financial loss of Rs 22,495 crores annually, most of which flows out of the country. The alarming growth rates, corresponding volumes and sophisticated approach of attackers is a matter of great concern. Regulatory agencies are doing their best by putting in an enforcement ecosystem through public awareness campaigns, cybercrime cells, dedicated online reporting portals and helplines. Despite all this, the mammoth problem needs to be tackled with a multi-pronged approach, one of which has to be individual precaution and prevention.

The basic problem stems from the fact that digital literacy has failed to keep pace with digital access, especially with rampant usage of smartphones and social media. Unbridled availability of individual data makes it easy for scamsters and criminals to target their victims, who could be vulnerable due to data exposure, low digital literacy, temptation to easy gains and psychological manipulation. Scamsters exploit loopholes in the system to gain access to victim’s personal data which is the main weapon for digital scams. A major contributing factor for such criminal acts is hyper-personalisation. As a marketing strategy, Businesses try to capture an individual’s data to curate personalised offerings for every potential customer. Enterprise databases are the prime target of hackers, who sell the harvested data to scamsters. We do hear about major data leaks where large-scale data breaches........

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