“From online shopping to e-learning, the number of users online increased multi-fold this year, and so did the cyber threats targeted at them,” said global cybersecurity company Kaspersky. According to its recent report, in 2020, 45% of online users in India were attacked by local cybersecurity threats, including via rootkits and removable tools such as malicious USB drives and other offline methods.
According to Kaspersky, it detected and blocked over 20 crore local cybersecurity threats on the consumers’ devices between January-December 2020, a period where working professionals and students were working from home and individuals were carrying out their transactions online.
"While spear phishing and web-skimming were prominent threat vectors in 2020, the cybercriminals also used social media platforms to target their victims and gain financial credentials and other sensitive data," the report mentioned.
The company said that its products detected and blocked 200,238,155 local cyber threats on consumer devices between January and December 2020. This affected 35% of the internet users in India, placing the country at the 43rd spot globally.
"The threat landscape in India, as well as in the APAC region, has been constantly evolving and the threats are becoming more and more sophisticated and targeted in nature," said Saurabh Sharma, Senior Security Researcher (GReAT), Kaspersky (APAC).
The threats nowadays are not only looming over enterprises and government bodies, but also are targeted at individual internet users, as they can be assumed to be vulnerable and an easy target by the nefarious groups of cybercriminals in order to obtain larger financial gains from them.
"Most recently, the trend of targeting attacks within the country have also been observed, in order to get hold of some sensitive data that can be misused by the cybercriminals," Sharma added.
In such social engineering attacks, a user is made to download a malicious file on his or her device. "Remotely working employees and students were vigorously targeted by cybercriminals due to the lack of necessary security solutions on their devices. As of January 2021, the number of global users encountering various threats using popular online learning platforms as a lure reached 270,171, a 60% increase when compared to the first half of 2020," Kaspersky said.
The share of attacks hosted by servers in India was 0.19%, which is over 77 lakh incidents in the January-December 2020 period.
"As we look forward to building a digital nation, it becomes equally necessary for us to be prepared to fight against the perils of the World Wide Web. Cybercriminal groups have been more active than ever in 2020 and will continue to try and exploit our vulnerabilities for their financial gains," said Dipesh Kaura, General Manager, Kaspersky (South Asia).