Over 500mn cyberattacks blocked in India in Q1 2023: Report

NEW DELHI: More than 500 million cyberattacks were blocked in India out of 1 billion global attacks, representing a sharp increase of over 29 per cent in the number of cyberattacks in Q1, 2023, compared to Q4, 2022, (829 million attacks), globally, a new report showed on Wednesday.

According to the application security SaaS firm Indusface, on average the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance) sector faced 38 per cent more attacks per application compared to the industry average, with over 9,73,000 attacks per website.

"It is interesting to see how industries such as BFSI and Healthcare are more targeted by vulnerability and bot attacks. Clearly, attackers are more interested in Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from these sectors. That said, other industries including SaaS and manufacturing are more targeted by DDoS attacks," said Ashish Tandon, CEO of Indusface.

Moreover, the report said the cyberattacks were particularly alarming for the Indian insurance sector, where it found that 11 per cent of all requests on insurance websites were attacked and this number is just 4 per cent as an industry average.

In Q1 2023, about 1,287 applications were attacked by bots versus 743 applications in Q4 2022, an increase of 73 per cent.

When compared to the industry average, BFS and insurance companies received 75 per cent and 33 per cent more bot attacks, respectively.