Paytm claims user data to be safe

NEW DELHI: After cyber-security company Firefox Monitor claimed that Paytm suffered a massive data breach two years back that may have exposed data of over 3.4 million users, the digital payments leader said on Wednesday that the data of its users is “completely safe”.

In a statement, a Paytm Mall spokesperson said the data of “our users is completely safe” and “claims related to data leak in the year 2020 are completely false and unsubstantiated”. “A fake dump uploaded on the platform haveibeenpwned.com appears to wrongly alert of a data breach on Firefox browser. We are getting in touch with Firefox and the platform to resolve the matter,” the company spokesperson added. As per Firefox Monitor, a security tracker by popular web browser Mozilla, Paytm was breached on August 30, 2020.

Single data breach now costs nearly Rs 17.5 crore in India: Report

The estimated average cost of a data breach in India rises to an all-time high of Rs 17.5 crore by 2022 – a 6.6 pc increase from last year, a new study showed on Wednesday. The average cost has gone up by 25 pc from Rs 1.4 crore in 2020. Additionally, India’s average cost per record of data breaches in 2022 stood at Rs 6,100, an increase of 3.3 percent from Rs 5,900 in 2021, according to the ‘2220 Data Breach Costs Report’ by big tech IBM. The top three industries per record cost are the industry at Rs 9,024, the services sector at Rs 7,085 and the technology sector at Rs 6,900. “We have reached a point where cyberattacks are developing into market pressures, hurting the economy,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, VP Technology, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India and South Asia.