India experienced a sharp rise in cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2023, according to reports from notable global security firms.

What Happened? As an Economic Times report reveals, Indusface’s ‘The State of Application Security Report’ states that over 500 million cyberattacks were blocked in the first quarter of 2023, out of a billion attacks worldwide.

CheckPoint Research, a cybersecurity firm, found that weekly attacks in India increased by 18% during the same period, compared to a global increase of 7%, averaging 1,248 attacks per week. The Asia Pacific region reported the highest year-on-year increase in attacks at 16% or an average of 1,835 attacks per week.

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Indusface discovered that the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector in India was the primary target, particularly insurance. In the Indian insurance sector, 11% of all websites experienced an attack, compared to the global average of 4%. Instead of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks like ransomware, 99% of the attacks were vulnerability attacks such as probe attacks using botnets.

During the period, researchers found over 24,000 critical, medium, and high vulnerabilities and more than 31% of them remained open for over six months.

Cybercrime Trends: Ashish Tandon, CEO of Indusface, explains that attackers show a clear preference for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from sectors like BFSI. In contrast, industries such as SaaS and manufacturing face a higher number of DDoS attacks. He points out that application availability might pose a greater challenge for these industries, and the affordability of computing power makes it easy to launch DDoS attacks.

The CheckPoint report also revealed that cybercriminals are conducting sophisticated campaigns and discovering ways to weaponize legitimate tools, such as using ChatGPT to generate code for launching cyberattacks.

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