Internet Security Threat Report: India third most vulnerable country to cyber threats

April 5, 2018

According to recently published Internet Security Threat Report, India emerged as third most vulnerable country in terms of risk of cyber threats, such as malware, spam and ransomware in 2017. India has moved up by one place over previous year. The report was published by security solutions provider Symantec. The global threat ranking of countries was based on 8 metrics viz. malware, spam, bots, phishing, network attacks, web attacks, ransomware and cryptominers.

Key Facts

United States (with 26.61% global threats) was most vulnerable country to such cyber-attacks, followed by China (10.95%) in 2017. In India, 5.09% of global threats were detected, slightly less than 5.11% in 2016. India continues to be second most impacted by spam and bots attacks, third most impacted by network attacks, and fourth most impacted by ransomware.
The threat landscape in recent years has become more diverse, attackers are working harder to discover new avenues of attack and cover their tracks while doing so. With the sudden spread of WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya ransomware attacks, swift growth in coinminers in 2017 provides another reminder that digital security threats can come from new and unexpected sources.
Cyber criminals are rapidly adding cryptojacking to their arsenal as ransomware market has become overpriced and overcrowded. It is rising threat to cyber and personal security. Cryptojacking is process of unauthorised coinminers siphoning resources from personal computer systems to giant data centers. Its massive profit incentive puts people, devices and organisations at risk of unauthorised coinminers. The crypto-coin mining gold rush resulted in an 8,500% increase in detections of coinminers on endpoint computers in final quarter of 2017.