 "Cybersecurity, cyberattack")
India has been experiencing a massive shift towards the digital realm. While this brings opportunities and growth, it also opens doors for cybercriminals to exploit these increasingly used digital platforms. For the period between January to December 2023, nearly two in five (33 per cent) of web users in India faced a form of Internet-born cyberattack.
Global cybersecurity company Kaspersky’s solutions detected and blocked a total of 62,574,546 internet-borne cyberthreats in the country.
KSN is a distributed infrastructure that analyses cybersecurity data to understand threat scenarios.
“Year-on-year, India’s cybersecurity landscape gets more and more complex, as cybercriminals find newer ways to exploit the vulnerabilities of both the organisation’s systems and the individual users’ behaviours. In addition to this, the severity of attacks is increasing and the results impact both the financial and the reputational status of a person or a company,” said Jaydeep Singh, General Manager for South Asia at Kaspersky.
He further added that with AI and other next-gen technologies' usage, they expect the fraud and scamming scenarios to get more intricate and challenging to detect. “We urge Indian users to install security solutions on their devices to protect themselves from these web attacks,” added Singh.
The report also reveals that cyberattacks via browsers and social engineering are the most prevalent methods of web infection.
More From This Section
The report added that attacks via browsers remain the main way of spreading malicious programs. Kaspersky’s report shows that cybercriminals often exploit the vulnerabilities in browsers and their plugins to penetrate the user systems.
Kaspersky’s report also revealed that social engineering is another major cyber threat in India, and around the world. In social engineering, the user is manipulated by the cybercriminal to download a malicious file and give control of the system to the criminal.
Often cybercriminals make their targets believe that they are downloading a legitimate application or program, and once the user downloads the program, the cybercriminal starts to control the victim’s device and uses it for malicious purposes.
“Machine learning-based modules and behaviour heuristics are key to fighting the stealthy threats that cyberattacks present. To prevent attacks through social engineering, we have security solutions capable of detecting threats as they are being downloaded from the Internet. Since many threat actors nowadays conceal malicious code to bypass static analysis and emulation, advanced technologies such as proactive Machine Language-based methods and behaviour analysis are used to fight this type of threat,” explains Singh.
