India: The top source and destination of cyber-criminals

According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, cyber-criminals are adopting corporate best practices and establishing professional businesses in order to increase the efficiency of their attacks against enterprises and consumers. With a young crowd, millions of mobile connections, rapid adoption of cloud, India continues to be a top source as well as the top destination of cyber attacks.

Once considered the spam capital of the world, India has seen a steady decrease in the amount of spam originating from its borders. After ranking 6th in 2014, India now ranks 18th as a source of spam. However, it continues to rank as the third top source of overall malicious activity including spam, malware, phishing hosts and bots, etc.

In 2015, Indian organizations were ranked 6th most targeted in Asia, receiving at least two attacks on an average. Also, over one in two attacks were aimed at small businesses in India, proving that companies of all sizes are at risk. 40 percent of BFSI businesses were also attacked at least once.

In fact, over the last three years, India has gradually moved up the ranking table to 3rd spot in 2015 for most financial Trojan infections globally as per a recent research by Symantec on Financial Threats 2015.

“Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and a highly-skilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off,” said Tarun Kaura, Director –Solution Product Management for Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec. “We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call center operations to increase the impact of their scams.”

As people conduct more of their lives online, attackers are increasingly focused on using the intersection of the physical and digital world to their advantage. In 2015, India witnessed a 156 percent increase in the percentage of social media scams. Every sixth scam impacted an Indian, making it the most targeted country in Asia and second in the world. A whopping 94 percent of these scams were spread through manual sharing, proving India’s burgeoning social media population remains a favored target of scammers, as they seek to leverage the trust people have in their own social circles to spread scams, fake links, and phishing.

The report also revealed that, with close to 5, 00,000 attacks last year, India ranked 11 amongst countries targeted the most by tech support scams.

“The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report reveals just how lucrative India is for cyber criminals. In fact, India is the second most favored destination for Ransom ware in Asia with the average number of attacks per day increasing 114 percent to 15 attacks per hour. Almost 10 percent of these attacks were crypto - ransom ware - posing a threat to consumers and enterprises alike,” said Kaura.

This year, ransom ware spread beyond PCs to smartphones, Mac and Linux systems, with attackers increasingly seeking any network-connected device that could be held hostage for profit, indicating that the enterprise is the next target.