Indian entities facing 3 times more cyberattack than global avg: Check Point

Indian organisations have faced over three times more cyberattack than the global average, with cryptocurrency mining malware impacting most of the entities, according to a research.

Most of the attacks have come on Indian companies via online medium, Israel-based firm Check Point Software Technologies said in its report for 2019.

"An organization in India is being attacked on average 1,565 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 474 attacks per organization globally. 93 per cent of the malicious files in India were delivered via the Web, compared to 35 per cent of malicious files globally," the report said.

The report cited cyber attack on Kundankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) by a malware designed for data extraction as one of the major attacks in India.

"The malware, linked by experts to the North-Korean group Lazarus, infected a computer in the plants external network, rather than the operational one," the report said.

It said that on May 19, an "unprotected MongoDB database" has exposed over 275 million records of Indian citizens.

"The exposed data included names, emails, mobile phone numbers, education details, professional info and current salaries. Despite the massive amounts of information, the database could not be linked to a specific owner," the report said.

Indian organisations were most adversely impacted by XMRig malware, which uses computer resources to mine cryto currencies.

"The top malware in India is XMRig, impacting 17 per cent of organizations," the report said.

On average, cryptocurrency mining malware accounted for 26.9 per cent, botnet 20.4 per cent, mobile malwares 20 per cent, banking 13.2 per cent and infostealer 8.7 per cent.

Check Point said that the Shade ransomware (also known as Troldesh), which historically targets Russian victims, has recently expanded to the United States, Japan, India, Thailand and Canada by English-language malspam.

A ransomware takes over the victim's computer and demands payments to unlock it.