From Air India to Facebook, here're top 10 cyberattacks in India

A major cybersecurity attack targeting Air India’s passenger service system has exposed the personal information of lakhs of passengers. With data breaches continuing to rise across the globe, Indian users data is increasingly being breached by cyber criminals.

According to a recent study by Infosys-Interbrand, the potential risk in brand value of data breach to the world’s 100 most valuable brands could amount to as much as $223 billion. According to Kaspersky’s telemetry, the numbers of Brute-force attacks against remote desktop protocol in India went from 1.3 million in February 2020 to 3.3 million in March 2020.

From April 2020, monthly attacks never dipped below 300 million, and they reached a new high of 409 million attacks worldwide in November 2020.

In February 2021, nearly one year from the start of the pandemic, there were 377.5 million brute-force attacks — a far cry from the 93.1 million witnessed at the beginning of 2020. India alone witnessed 9.04 million attacks in February. The total number of attacks recorded in India between January and February 2021 was around 15 million.

According to a study by IBM Security, the average total cost of a data breach in India touched Rs 14 crore in 2020 (an increase of 9.4 per cent from last year) as the average time to contain a data breach increased from 77 to 83 days.