India among the top-10 countries hit by ransomware cybercrime

Cyber threats such as crypto ransomware and locker ransomware have 3% each detection in the country

That India is increasing scaling the list of cyber criminals is a known fact, but a recent report says that India ranks ninth as the most impacted region by ransomware.

According to security solutions and services provider Symantec's report, India follows other countries like US, Japan, UK, Italy and Germany who top the charts. Moreover, cyber threats such as crypto ransomware and locker ransomware have 3% each detection in India.

Ransomware is a type of malware that restricts the access of computer system that it infects, and demands a ransom for the restriction to be removed. After many years of evolution, ransomware has emerged as one of the most troublesome malware categories of our time, said the report.

Ransomware has had a global spread as, according to Symantec's telemetry, 11 of the top 12 countries impacted by ransomware in the past 12 months are all direct or indirect member states of the G20 organization. In April 2015, Symantec's Internet Security threat report highlighted the rise of Digital Extortion in India.
 

India ranked third highest in the Asia Pacific region for ransomware attacks with over 60,000 attacks received per year or about 7 attacks per hour with a staggering 86% being crypto ransomware. With the increasing spread of connected devices, such as wearable computers and the Internet of Things (IoT), ransomware may be on the cusp of another evolutionary jump forward. In a latest research Symantec found that it would not be difficult for current-generation ransomware to make the leap from mobile phones to wearable devices such as smartwatches.
 

The average ransom amount is $300. The favored payment method for locker ransomware is payment vouchers and for crypto ransomware, it's bitcoins. In the past 12 months, 64% of binary-file-based ransomware detected have been crypto ransomware while binary-based locker ransomware made up the remaining 36%.