Over 947mn cyberattacks blocked in India out of 1.1bn worldwide in Q2: Report

New Delhi, Aug 21 (IANS) More than 947 million cyberattacks blocked in India, out of a global total of 1.1 billion in the second quarter (Q2) of 2023, a new report showed on Monday.

According to the Tata Capital-funded company Indusface, this figure reflects a sharp escalation of 90 per cent in the frequency of cyberattacks on Indian websites during Q2, as compared to Q1, which recorded 500 million attacks.

“The India story is an exciting one and looks like even the bad actors have noticed it. While we track the growth in attacks worldwide, no other major geography saw an increase of 90 per cent on attacks,” said Ashish Tandon, CEO of Indusface.

Banking and insurance and healthcare were the particularly targeted sectors that were heavily affected as each website in this sector faced bot attacks.

The majority of bot attacks increased by 48 per cent in Q2 (88 million attacks) compared to Q1, 2023 (59 million attacks), underlining the pervasive nature of this threat.

DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks also increased significantly, seeing a 75 per cent upswing from the previous quarter globally.

Following India, the countries from which the most attacks originated were the US and the UK, according to the report.

“DDoS continues to be the #1 threat vector. Enterprises continue to prioritise application availability for legitimate users and risk DDoS attacks as the implications of false positives are significant. This is because most methods to combat DDoS don’t adapt well enough especially when there are bursts in traffic on legitimate use cases such as a year-end tax return filing,” Tandon said.

In addition, the report mentioned that the total number of DDoS attacks globally reached 8,72,105,826, while bot attacks amounted to 88,186,868, emphasising the scale of the cyber threat landscape.