India becomes 7th target country suffering from web application attacks

Our experience suggests that an army of new potential attackers comes online every day: Senior Editor of the report

With the digitisation drive gaining momentum, India has been ranked seventh on the list of target countries for Web Application Attacks globally in the third quarter this year, indicating an urgent need to beef up application and infrastructure security in the country, a new report said on Wednesday.

When it comes to cyber attacks originating from a country, India saw a drop from the fifth spot in the second quarter to being seventh as the number of attacks also grew significantly -- more than 20 million attacks were sourced from the country -- said the "State of the Internet Q3 2017 Security Report" by content delivery network Akamai.

According to the World Bank, India has 10,350 secured servers which, when put against a user base of 462 million Internet users, is a clear indication of the need for better infrastructure to be able to support the data surge.

The report found that the number of web application attacks in Q3 2017 increased 69 per cent in total from the same time last year.

Over the last year, a 217 per cent increase in attacks sourcing from the US was seen, with an increase of 48 per cent in the last quarter as compared to the prior one.

Evaluation of the Mirai botnet and WireX malware attacks suggest that attackers may leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and Android devices to build future botnet armies, the report pointed out.

"The lure of easy access to poorly-secured end nodes and easily-available source code make it likely that Mirai-based attacks won't be fading in the near future," said Martin McKeay, Senior Security Advocate and Senior Editor of the report.

"Our experience suggests that an army of new potential attackers comes online every day. Couple with that, the ubiquity of Android software and the growth in the IOT segment are amplifying the risk/reward challenges that enterprises face to tremendous levels," he added.

SQL injection (SQLi) attacks increased 62 per cent since last year and 19 per cent since last quarter, the report said.