Nearly 2 In 5 Web Users In India Faced Cyberattack Last Year: Report

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New Delhi: Nearly two in five (33 percent) web users in India faced a form of Internet-born cyberattack in 2023, a new report revealed on Thursday. According to the global cybersecurity company Kaspersky, a total of 62,574,546 Internet-borne cyber threats were detected and blocked in the country.

"With the world moving towards AI and other next-gen technologies, we expect the fraud and scamming scenarios to get more intricate and challenging to detect. Thus, we urge Indian users to install security solutions on their devices to protect themselves from these web attacks," said Jaydeep Singh, General Manager for South Asia at Kaspersky. ()

The report also revealed that cyberattacks via browsers and social engineering are the most prevalent methods of web infection. Cybercriminals often exploit the vulnerabilities in browsers and their plugins to penetrate the user systems. ()

Users are typically attacked when they visit an infected website. This occurs without the user's awareness or action, and may result in the download of harmful file-less malware, the researchers explained.

Another popular web threat in India and around the world is 'social engineering' to defraud users. In social engineering, the user is manipulated by the cybercriminal to download a malicious file and give control of the system to the criminal.

Cybercriminals often trick their victims into thinking they are downloading a legitimate application or programme, and then once the user downloads the programme, they control the victim's device and use it for malicious purposes.

"Since many threat actors nowadays conceal malicious code to bypass static analysis and emulation, advanced technologies such as proactive Machine Language-based methods and behaviour analysis are used to fight this type of threat," Singh said.