India witnesses 18% surge in weekly cyber attacks in Jan-Mar 2023: Report

Every organisation in India faced an average of 2,108 weekly attacks in the first quarter of 2023, indicating a18 per cent increase from the year-ago period. 

While the global weekly attacks saw an increase of seven per cent during the reported quarter versus the same quarter last year with each organisation facing an average of 1,248 attacks per week.

A PTI report on Friday said, citing Check Point, that cybercriminals are misusing tools like ChatGPT for code generation that can help less-skilled threat actors effortlessly launch cyberattacks, Trojanizing the 3CXDesktop app for a supply chain attack, etc for malicious gains.

 

The Asia Pacific region witnessed the highest Year-on-Year (YoY) increase in weekly attacks, with an average of 1,835 attacks per organisation, marking a 16 per cent increase. One out of every 31 organisations globally was subjected to a ransomware attack every week, the report suggested. 

It also added, "Globally, the education and research sector faced the highest number of attacks, rising to an average of 2,507 attacks per organisation per week, marking a 15 per cent increase compared to March 2022 quarter."

India in 2022 reported a total of 1.39 million cyber security incidents, Minister of State for Electronics and Information and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar informed the Parliament on February 10.

Chandrasekhar also disclosed the findings of a technical analysis of the AIIMS Delhi cyberattack and said "the attacks were the handiwork of unknown threat actors and were caused due to improper network segmentation."

An Inc42 report suggests that the number of reported cyberattacks, however, fell in 2022, down from 1.40 million in 2021. As per official data, 208,000 incidents were reported in 2018, 394,000 attacks were recorded in 2018 and 1.15 million cybersecurity incidents were reported to CERT-In in 2020. 

According to another report published in LiveMint in 2022, India 2022 saw the highest number of cyber attacks on government agencies.