According to a report by Microsoft, India accounts for 13 per cent of cyberattacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, making it one of the top three most attacked countries by nation-state actors.
India has begun to advance cyber incident reporting requirements in the last 12 months and is one of the few countries that has taken steps to secure digital infrastructure. According to the report, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to develop new risks, while it also helps defenders in their defence against such attacks.
Microsoft has claimed to synthesise approximately 65 trillion signals each day, or 750 billion signals per second, utilising AI algorithms to understand and protect against digital threats and criminal cyberactivity. The company prevented 237 billion brute force password attacks and mitigated 619,000 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In a DDoS attack, hackers attempt to disrupt a server, service, or network by flooding it with Internet traffic, rendering it unavailable to legitimate users, as per the report.
Moreover, there has been an increase of 200 per cent in human-operated ransomware attacks since September 2022.
The report said there was also a sharp increase in password-based and multi-factor authentication (MFA) fatigue attacks during the year. Microsoft has observed about 6,000 MFA fatigue attempts per day over the last year.
Furthermore, in the first quarter of 2023, there was a dramatic tenfold increase in password-based attacks against cloud identities, particularly in the education sector, from around 3 billion per month to over 30 billion, that is an average of 4,000 password attacks per second targeting Microsoft cloud identities this year.
