India faced over 18mn cyber threats in Q1 2022: Norton

India witnessed over 18 million cyber attacks and threats, at an average of nearly 200,000 threats every day, in the first three months of 2022, according to US-based cyber security firm, Norton. The company states in its Cyber Safety Pulse Report that the quarter spotted nearly 60,000 phishing attempts through this quarter, as well as over 30,000 tech support scams in this time.

The company notes that deepfakes and cryptocurrency-related scams were among the most prevalent around the world, during this quarter. Attackers even combined multiple tactics to use deepfakes in creating propaganda linked to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis – and use this trap to call for donations in crypto tokens to wallets.

Norton also stated that crypto scams are also expected to rise this year, amounting to over $29 million lost last year in just Bitcoin breaches. Through Q1 2022, Norton noted over 1 billion cyber threats around the world, at an average of over 11 million attacks everyday. Phishing attacks amounted to approximately 16 million threats around the world in this quarter.

The global cyber security space has continued to see an increasing volume of threats, with the Ukraine-Russia conflict seeing numerous cyber attackers, including state-backed hackers, ramping up their targeted efforts. An April 2022 report by Russian cyber security company Kaspersky stated that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or cyber breaches that use a bulk volume of server information requests to take down an online service, shot up around the world by nearly 4.6x year on year, in this quarter.

Other threats have also risen proportionately around the world – a report in March 2022 by US-based cloud security firm Zscaler noted a rise in the use of banking trojan tool DanaBot, in a bid to spread malware across devices.

Talking about the cyber threat landscape through the previous quarter, Darren Shou, head of technology for cyber security service NortonLifeLock, said, “Cyber criminals are masters at profiting from deception, so it’s crucial for consumers to be aware of the latest scams and to critically analyze anything suspicious they encounter on the internet, whether on social media or in their inbox.”