CYFIRMA, an external threat landscape management platform, has released India Threat Landscape report 2023 focusing on threats targeting India and strategies to counter them.
According to the report, India is the most targeted country with 13.7% of all attacks followed by the US with 9.6%, Indonesia and China with 9.3% and 4.5%, respectively. From what it’s understood, the number of cyberattacks on government agencies has increased year-on-year. In the second half of 2022, there were seemingly 95% more cyberattacks on government agencies than in the same period in 2021. Reportedly, the number of state-sponsored cyber attacks in India increased by more than 100% in 2022 compared to 2021. It’s believed that India was the most targeted country in 2022, as attacks on government agencies more than doubled.
Based on data from the report, healthcare is the most targeted sector by hackers followed by education, research, government and military sectors. Sources suggest that the data from the report has shown that an organisation in India was attacked 1,866 times per week on average in 2022. Furthermore, the most common types of cyber attacks in India are believed to be phishing attacks, malware attacks, and ransomware attacks. The report also added that 78% of Indian organisations experienced a ransomware attack in 2021, with 80% of those attacks resulting in data encryption.
“It comes as no surprise that India is the most targeted country in the world by threat actors. I believe India’s prominence at the world stage and push from Western economies to favour India over other countries, a young and tech savvy population with low cybersec maturity seems to have played a role in hackers coming after critical assets, govt agencies with an intent to breach them and harm India’s strategic interests. While sectors such as BFSI, healthcare and software companies have spent on improving their security posture, there is a need to understand the external threat landscape. We believe that unless you don’t know who to defend against, billions spent in cybersec will not yield results,” Kumar Ritesh, founder and CEO, CYFIRMA, said
