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India Saw Over 1,700 Cyber Attacks a Week in Last 6 Months, Double the Global Average: Report

author The Wire Staff
Mar 27, 2023
The cybersecurity threat landscape in India is getting wider, and the most attacked industry segment in India is the healthcare industry, followed by the defence and education sectors.

New Delhi: India reported 1,787 cyber attacks a week on average in an organisation in the last six months, as compared to the global average of 983, according to cybersecurity solutions company, Check Point Software Technologies.

The cybersecurity threat landscape in India is getting wider, and the most attacked industry segment in India is the healthcare industry, followed by defence and education sectors, Rupal Shah Hollenback, president of Check Point Software Technologies, told the Hindu BusinessLine.

The top three vulnerable industry segments have something in common – a hybrid infrastructure, on-premises and cloud, she added.

“Plus, they are using regular digital devices at the consumer-facing front. You have industries that are using the cloud more and more, while using endpoints, IoT devices and consumer devices at the same time. So, the threat landscape has changed fundamentally in India,” the business daily reported her as saying.

“As the country becomes digitised, automatically the threat landscape gets bigger. Digitisation just brings in bad cyber actors. There are always bad actors [who] exist on the ground. But now, these bad actors have gone digital,” she added.

Globally, manufacturing and financial sectors are at the highest risk of cyber threat.

“The bad actors, they’re not just coming in through the network. They’re coming in through anywhere from 17 to 45 entry points in an organisation, posing a bigger cybersecurity challenge than ever before,” she told the newspaper.

Last year, an organisation in India was attacked 1,866 times per week on average, Check Point Research said in a report. It added that global cyberattacks increased by 38% in 2022 as compared to 2021.

The top three most attacked industries in India were healthcare, education, research and government, and the military.

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