Over 1.6 mn cyber attacks blocked on Indian insurance firms a day in Jan: Report

Insurance firms storing vast amounts of customers’ financial and personal data are attractive targets for cybercriminals. A new report published on Monday by Indusface, a Tata Capital-funded software-as-a-service (SaaS) and security, noted that it blocked over 1.6 million cyber-attacks on Indian insurance companies every day in January this year.

A total of 49,844,877 cyber-attacks were recorded on 114 insurance sector websites. 

On average, insurance sector applications face 430,000 attacks each, which is close to the overall average of 450,000 attacks per app across all industries, according to the report. 

The report also discovered that 51% of the Indian insurance websites were attacked with DDoS requests which is much higher than the overall average of 30% sites being attacked by DDoS requests. 

Apart from the DDoS request attacks, the other key concern for the insurance sector in India is the rise of bot attacks. Over 6 million such bot attacks were documented in January. 

"The rise of bot attacks on the insurance industry is concerning as these tend to be more sophisticated and surgical. The potential risks that Indian insurers face range from unauthorised access to financial data and other sensitive information, or even the internal systems of the insurance company itself," said Ashish Tandon, Founder and CEO, Indusface. 

The bot attacks mounted by hackers are of three major types - account takeover, card cracking and scraping. The study noted that hackers usually use bot attacks to take over financial accounts and conduct credit card fraud via cracking and scraping. 

Apart from the large volumes of sensitive and lucrative information such as credit card details, banking information and personal data of customers, the other key factor driving attacks on Indian insurance companies is the rise of vulnerabilities. 

"Most of the insurance companies are on the path to digital transformation in order to cater to digitally savvy consumers. This has increased the number of applications, and the attack surface as well," said the report. 

According to another study released on December 30, 2022, by Indusface, India has become one of the most attacked and breached countries in the world. Among the 829 million cyber-attacks detected and blocked globally by the firm in the fourth quarter of 2022, close to 59% were directed towards India. Companies in banking finance services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing and information technologies (IT), were the top three sectors facing the maximum cyber-attacks.