Over 30% of Indian web users attacked by cybercriminals from January to March: Kaspersky

Moscow-based anti-virus software company Kaspersky Lab has said that cybercriminals attacked 31% of Indian web users from January to March.

“In today’s day and age, having a cybersecurity protection plan is as crucial as life insurance, as we live a large part of our lives online with crucial financial, personal and official data,” Purshottam Bhatia, digital sales manager at Kaspersky Lab, South Asia, said.

Kaspersky Lab is a multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider headquartered in Russia, which has been operating in the market for over 21 years.

In March, another cybersecurity solutions provider Quick Heal Technologies said that India faced a total of 50 million cyber threats from July to December last year, translating into 186 detections per minute.

According to the report, these detections include threats such as cryptojacking, ransomware, trojans, exploits, worms, infectors, potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) and adware.

Cryptojacking emerged as one of the most prominent threats during the period, with more than 15,000 instances surfacing on a daily average totalling 2.76 million detections.

Ransomware, too, remained one of the persistent threats, the report said, adding that Quick Heal detected 2,000 instances on a daily basis.

According to a study released by Quick Heal in 2018, there was a 300% jump in the number of ransomware attacks, with over 930 million Windows malware instances detected in 2017 compared with 2016 and such attacks could be fiercer and more vicious in 2018. 

Last week, South African information technology firm Dimension Data’s research pointed out that the average cybersecurity maturity rating stands at only 1.45 out of 5 points worldwide. 

It said that the finance and technology sectors were the most mature at 1.71 and 1.66 points, respectively.