India was second on the list of Asia-Pacific countries which faced the most cyberattacks in 2020, revealed a new report by IBM Security X-Force. India faced seven per cent of all attacks in Asia in the previous year with Japan on top. Globally, Europe was the most affected continent with over 31 per cent attacks accounted for, and the majority being ransomware attacks.
As per the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, finance and insurance was the most affected sector in India as it faced 60 per cent of the attacks. In 2020, most of the attacks on companies in India were observed from May to July period, adds the report.
Cyberattackers took advantage of the conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic globally and targeted sectors like hospitals, medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers and others as companies. The reason was that these sectors were part of the Covid-19 supply chain and could not afford downtime, and thus had to pay off the ransomware eventually. “We also witnessed cybercriminals using relief efforts and public health information as spam lures including targeted attacks on critical components of the vaccine supply chain. These all remain issues in 2021,” Sudeep Das, Security Software Technical Sales Leader, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia said.
60 per cent of ransomware attacks that the security company included in its report used a double extortion strategy as attackers encrypted, stole the data and then threatened to leak it if their ransom demand was not met. The report suggests that data breaches and ransomware attacks are beginning to collide. This conclusion is based on 36 per cent of data breaches that came from ransomware attacks involved alleged data theft as well.
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