India making progress in cybersecurity, threats fall in 2019: Kaspersky

Cyberthreat incidents dropped in India last year as the country made progress in fight against cybercriminals, cybersecurity company Kaspersky said.

"India has shown a positive progress in their fight against cybercriminals. The country reportedly saw a fall in the number of threats in 2019 as compared to 2018," it said in a statement here on Tuesday.

According to Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) reports, from 2018 and 2019 there has been a moderate decrease in the number of attacks targeted at India.

The statement said: "38.8 per cent of the overall Indian Kaspersky users were attacked at least once by a web-based attacks in 2019 as compared to 2018 when it was 40.4 per cent".

These threats include file-less malwares, social engineering attacks and other attacks that were targeted through the world wide web.

"The total number of unique threats detected by Kaspersky products in the year 2019 were 142,250,268", the company said.

The local threats or local infections detected in India by Kaspersky products in 2019 were 231,142,762, bringing the country on the 69th rank worldwide as compared to 2018 when the attacks detected were 297,477,131 and India was in the 47th place worldwide, it added.

These attacks usually happen due to major spreading of malware via removable USB drives, CDs and DVDs, and other "offline" methods, it was noted.

India also ranks 14th worldwide in the number of attacks caused by servers that were hosted in India, which accounts of 8,064,950 incidents in 2019, the company said.

Senior Security Researcher, Global Research and Analysis Team Asia Pacific (GReAT APAC), Saurabh Sharma said, "In India we did see a decrease in the number of adware and malware attacks."

"However, there has been a huge increase in riskware attacks from 28 per cent in 2018 to 39 per cent in 2019.

The presence of riskware on your machine will allow threat actors to use that legitimate application for malicious purpose," Sharma said.