According to a recent report by Kaspersky, online cyber threats had increased significantly over the past year, placing us on the 43rd rank globally. Further, the report added that 35 per cent of online users in India were attacked by web-borne threats in 2020.
Kaspersky detected and blocked 133,318,878 internet-borne threats in 2020. “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. Remotely working employees and students were vigorously targeted by cybercriminals due to the lack of necessary security solutions on their devices,” it added.
According to the report, as of January 2021, the number of global users encountering various threats using popular online learning platforms as a lure reached 270,171, this was a 60 per cent increase compared to the first half of 2020. In 2020, around 45 per cent of online users in India were attacked by local threats. Kaspersky products detected and blocked 200,238,155 local threats on the consumer devices between January 2020–December 2020. These local cyber threats include rootkits and removable tools like malicious USB drives and other offline methods. In India, 36 million attacks were detected between January 2020- November 2020.
Further, the report said that the share of attacks hosted by servers in India was 0.19 per cent, with 7,714,258 incidents in the period January 2020-December 2020 were recorded, placing India in 18th place worldwide. “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 said.
