829 mn cyber attacks blocked; 59% of targeted websites in India: Indusface

Mid-market firms with revenues of $10 million to $1 billion faced 45% of attacks; only 21% were large ones with over $1 billion in revenue; smaller firms suffered 34% of attacks

India continues to climb the cyber crime charts. According to the recently released 'State of Application Security Q4, 2022' Report by Indusface, which analysed 1,400 applications and blocked over 829 million cyberattacks in Q4 of 2022, about 59 per cent of the websites attacked were in India.

Indusface, a TCGF II (Tata Capital) funded firm, also reported that from a revenue perspective, mid-market companies with revenues between $10 million to $1 billion have been subjected to 45 per cent of the cyber attacks and only 21 per cent were large enterprises with over $1 billion in revenue. On the other hand, small businesses accounted for 34 per cent of the attacks, implying that every business is at risk.

Ashish Tandon, Founder & CEO, Indusface, said, “In this quarter, we saw almost 20 applications of a healthcare customer get targeted by DDoS attacks. We also saw a 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. By bundling managed services in the AppTrana WAF, we guarantee zero false positives. No wonder that 99 per cent of applications on AppTrana are always in block mode.

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 per cent of all attacks were blocked using them. The report also highlights the increased use of ‘virtual patching’ to protect applications at the Web Application Firewall level. DDoS attacks affected 32 per cent of all apps during the last 60 days of the observation period.

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 per cent each. As far as the region is concerned, 59 per cent of the websites are in India, followed by 23 per cent in the US and Canada.