Chennai most vulnerable to cyber attacks in India

Chennai

The report released on Tuesday, which came amid warning from CERT-In that malicious gangs were planning massive phishing attack in the name of COVID-19 initiatives by government agencies, analysed various cyberattacks within the country during the period and found that threat actors targeted Chennai with a variety of attacks aimed at exploiting user trust and enterprise vulnerabilities.

The ‘infection rate’ in Chennai stood at 42 per cent, (meaning 42 out of 100 netizens encountered a thwarted cyber attack), followed by Patna at 38 per cent, and Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata at 35 per cent each.

These attacks were designed to exploit user trust and scam people for financial gains. The threat actors predominantly targeted SMEs by exploiting vulnerabilities caused by the sudden shift to working-from-home and SMEs being ill-equipped to handle cyberattacks.

The report, however, said that there was an 8 per cent decrease in cyber-attacks compared to the incidents in the previous quarter.

“Small and medium enterprises, and small office, home office sector must invest more in ensuring the safety of their IT infrastructure. We are seeing an increasing trend of threat actors targeting such enterprises,” the report said.

“The most worrying of all is the new trend of many advanced threat actors offering malware as a service to cybercriminals,” said J Kesavardhanan, founder and CEO of K7 Computing. The report highlighted a newly discovered vulnerability which lets a user join a password-protected meeting without a password in video conferencing platform.

Popular Wi-Fi chipsets have been affected by a vulnerability that allows unauthorised decryption of WPA2-encrypted traffic. It is believed that more than a billion devices could be exploited by this vulnerability, the report said.

In mobile devices the number of Trojan infections has increased by 14 per cent. Threat actors are increasingly rolling out complex Trojan-based apps that steal victims’ banking credentials. The attackers disguise as genuine apps and once downloaded steal all your data.