Time to come clean on data breaches

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Editor's note: When I started writing on fintech, some six years ago, cybersecurity incidents at financial institutions were few and far between. The number of cyber attacks and data leaks has gone up considerably since. Ask any cybersecurity expert, and they will tell you that we have entered a new era of internet security.  In response, financial regulators—the Reserve Bank of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India—and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, have updated their cybersecurity guidelines to ensure companies follow best practices. For instance, the window to report a cybersecurity incident to the regulators has narrowed over the years from a few days to a few hours.However, companies, on their part, continue to cling to a culture of denial and silence when it comes to informing their customers about cybersecurity incidents, especially those involving data leaks. No firm wants to admit that it faced a cyber attack for fear of damaging its reputation or causing a fall in its share prices.  In the first three months of this year alone, Indian companies faced over 18 …