India sees sharp increase in cyberattacks in Q1 2023: report

Data from cybersecurity firm CheckPoint Research showed that weekly attacks increased by 18% in India during the same time period, as against an increase of 7% globally, averaging 1,248 attacks a week. The Asia Pacific region overall reported the highest year-on-year surge in attacks at 16% or an average of 1,835 attacks a week.

Indusface found that the BFSI sector in India was the target of most attacks, especially insurance. Within the Indian insurance sector, 11% of all websites faced an attack, as against the global average of 4%. Rather than distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks like ransomware, 99% of the attacks are vulnerability attacks like probe attacks using botnets.

Despite finding over 24,000 critical, medium, and high vulnerabilities during the period, more than 31% of these had remained open for over 6 months.

“Clearly, attackers are more interested in Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from these sectors. That said, other industries including SaaS and manufacturing are more targeted by DDoS attacks. Possibly application availability is a bigger challenge for these sectors. Also, compute power is extremely cheap to hire and this makes launching DDoS attacks extremely easy,” said Ashish Tandon, CEO of Indusface.

The CheckPoint report also found that cybercriminals are running sophisticated campaigns and finding ways to weaponise legitimate tools like using ChatGPT to generate code to launch cyberattacks.

Globally, the education and research sector was the hardest hit, with over 2,500 attacks a week, followed by the government and military sectors with over 1,700 attacks. Retail saw the highest surge in attacks at 40%, followed by healthcare at 22%.Data insights from Indusface report:

• Over 500 million attacks were blocked in the first three months of 2023

• The banking industry relies on custom rules. More than 50% of the attacks were blocked using custom rules

• The insurance industry was the most attacked as it received 12 times more attacks than all industries

• No of attacks per site for insurance industry 9,95,455

• No of attacks per site for all industries 83,264

Global attack trends from CheckPoint Research report:

• Global weekly attacks rose by 7% in Q1 2023 versus the same quarter last year, with each organization facing an average of 1,248 attacks per week

• During the first quarter of 2023, India’s average weekly attacks rose by 18% in comparison to the corresponding period in 2022, with each organization facing an average of 2108 weekly attacks per organization

• APAC region experienced the highest YoY surge in weekly attacks, with an average of 1,835 attacks per organization, marking a 16% increase

• 1 out of every 31 organizations worldwide experienced a ransomware attack every week