India one of the top targets for cybercriminals, says study

The phenomenal growth of data coupled with cybersecurity teams’ inability to plug vulnerabilities is accelerating cyber-attacks in organisations across size and sector and India is one of the top targets for cybercriminals, according to a new study.  

The report by Indusface, a Tata Capital-funded software-as-a-service security (SaaS) firm, analysed more than 1,400 applications that blocked over 829 million cyber-attacks globally in Q4, 2022, found that 59% of the websites attacked were in India. 

Revenue-wise, mid-market companies with revenues between $10 million to $1 billion have been subjected to 45% of the cyber-attacks and only 21% were large enterprises with over $1 billion in revenue. On the other hand, small businesses accounted for 34% attacks which implies that every business is at risk of such attacks, said the report. 

The security firm said that the ability to create custom rules has stood out as a key enabler of cyber security. On an average, each enterprise deploys 48 custom rules, and 60% of all attacks were blocked using these custom rules. The report also highlights the increase in ‘virtual patching’ as a measure to protect applications at the Web Application Firewall level. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks affected 32% of all apps during the last 60 days of the observation period.

“In this quarter, we saw almost 20 applications of a healthcare customer get targeted by DDoS attacks. We also saw a software as a service (SaaS) application hit with a 2TB attack. In both the cases, the attacks were quickly thwarted with AI sending out anomaly alerts and a managed services team deploying surgical rules,” Ashish Tandon Founder& CEO, Indusface, said.

The top three segments vulnerable to the attacks are banking, insurance, and other finance companies, followed by IT services and manufacturing companies. SaaS/IT products and Retail/e-commerce also have a decent representation of 9% each. As far as the region is concerned, 59% of the websites are in India, followed by 23% in the US and Canada. 

India is one of the key targets for cybercriminals with over 75% of Indian firms found to have been hit by ransomware attacks since 2019, according to a report by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, published in September 2022. 

Earlier in the month of November, Central Depository Services (India) Limited (CDSL) detected a malware in some of its internal machines. More recently, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), a top medical institution in New Delhi was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted most of its online services for over two weeks. The hospital was forced to shut down its servers and switch to manual operations for inpatient, and outpatient services.  In October, Tata Power, one of the biggest power suppliers in the country which serves 12 million consumers, said that its IT systems were hit by a cyber-attack.  

The reports also noted that although India has been paying greater attention to cyber security, the rising number of attacks on India will continue to be a worrying sign for Indian security managers.