According to the State of Application Security Report by Indusface, India has witnessed an increase in cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2023. Almost 500 million cyberattacks were blocked out of a billion globally.
The report states that the banking, financial services and insurance sector in India was targeted the most, especially insurance. The insurance sector in India faced 11 per cent attacks, against the global average of four per cent. 99 per cent of the attacks were vulnerability attacks like probe attacks by botnets. The insurance sector was attacked 12 times more than other industries, with the number of attacks per site reaching 9,95,455. The number of attacks per site for all industries amounted to 83,264. There were over 24,000 critical, medium and high vulnerabilities during the period, where more than 31 per cent of these were open for over six months.
According to the report, the attackers were more interested in personally identifiable information (PII) from these sectors. Due to the ease in launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, industries including software-as-a-service (SaaS) and manufacturing are targeted more by them. Further, the report added that banking and healthcare industries witnessed the maximum heat from bot attacks. More than 50 per cent of the attacks were blocked using custom rules of the banking industry.
