India becomes favourite destination for cyber criminals amid Covid-19

Year 2020 saw one of the largest numbers of data breaches and the numbers seem to be only rising

cyber security, cyber attacks, cybersecurity, data, privacy, hackers, hacking

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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

Shivani Shinde Neha Alawadhi Mumbai/New Delhi

6 min read Last Updated : Apr 06 2021 | 11:45 PM IST

With pandemic disrupting businesses and with remote working becoming reality, cyber criminals have been busy exploiting vulnerabilities. Year 2020 saw one of the largest numbers of data breaches and the numbers seem to be only rising.

According to Kaspersky’s telemetry, when the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the total number of bruteforce attacks against remote desktop protocol (RDP) jumped from 93.1 million worldwide in February 2020 to 277.4 million 2020 in March—a 197 per cent increase. The numbers in India went from 1.3 million in February 2020 to 3.3 million in March 2020. From April 2020 onward, monthly attacks never dipped below 300 million, and they reached a new high of 409 million attacks worldwide in November 2020.