India continues to rank as the third top source of overall malicious activity, including spam, malware, phishing hosts and bots, with the burgeoning social media population a favourite target.
According to the annual Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2016, every sixth scam in 2015 impacted an Indian, making it the most-targeted country in Asia and the second in the world. As much as 94 per cent of these scams were spread manually, meaning people shared (or forwarded) fake links and emails among their friends and social circles.
Fake technical-support scam is another route, which saw a 200 per cent rise globally. With close to 5,00,000 attacks last year, India ranked 11 amongst countries targeted the most by tech-support scams, the report, which was released on Thursday, said. “The difference now is that scammers send fake warning messages to devices like smartphones to prompt people to call attackers directly in order to dupe them into buying useless services or even install malware,” it said.
Businesses continued to be targeted, with many even getting hit multiple times. Last year, organisations in India were the sixth most targeted in Asia, with each getting hit at least twice on an average.
Most risk-prone
Among the business sectors, mining was the most risk-prone with one out of two companies being attacked at least once last year. Forty per cent of BFSI companies also were targeted at least once. Even smaller companies are falling victims. Last year, over 52% of attacks were aimed at such firms in India.
Ransomware attacks, wherein the victim’s device gets locked until a specified amount is paid to the attacker, grew by 35 per cent globally.
For some reason, November saw most attacks, globally and in India. In that month, there were on an average 2.5 targeted attacks per day aimed at Indian companies.
