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Indians, in particular, seem to go ga-ga for click-bait videos and articles which have pervaded social media. The country ranks second in the world when it comes to falling for social media scams, said the Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) brought out by software security company, Symantec, which analyses millions of attacks through 2014.
Nearly 6.23 per cent of victims of all social media scams are from India, which is second behind United States which has a whopping 30.22 per cent of all worldwide attacks.
Tarun Kaura, Director of Technology Sales (India) for the company describes the modus operandi of the ‘manual sharing’ which constitutes four out of five social media attacks: “On clicking, they force you to ‘like’ the video. This adds to the scam becoming viral, and getting your friends to click on it too. Then they direct you to a survey, to make it seem more authentic. Eventually, they ask you to download malware – in the guise of a software update – that will steal data,” he said.
The 20th edition of the report shows India climbing the charts in numerous categories. In terms of bot infections (internet-connected software that relays information about an individual’s system to the hacker), India has leap-frogged five positions since 2013 to rank 16 in the world.
India becomes the top source of Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack – which makes the infected machine slower and its cripples its internet systems. With over 60,000 “ransom-ware” attacks – a type of digital extortion where the hacker disables your system until a payment is given – detected yearly in the country, India finds itself in third place in Asia.
One-thirds of all attacks in India are targeted at small businesses; with metros like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Pune having reported to have 65 per cent of the overall bot infections in the country.
Symantec believes 317 million variants of malware are released onto the networks daily.
