India 2nd Ranked In Cyber Attacks Through Social Media

Cyber criminals are now using social networking sites to target users in India.

According to a report from Symantec, a security solutions provider, India ranked second among nations that were most targeted for cyber crimes through the social media in 2014, after the US.

Though emails are still considered as the most common method of cyber attack, attackers are also using social media as a “ready base” for crime. In order to reach more people with less effort, cyber criminals continue to experiment with new attack methods. The data clearly reveals that cybercriminals have become smarter and with more sophisticated tools, the attackers are expected to get more proficient in the coming years too.

While 2014 was termed as a year of breaches and zero-day attacks as it saw more targeted attacks, more zero-day vulnerabilities and compromising of a greater number of networks, India had the second highest number of social media scams globally and the highest in the Asia Pacific region. As attackers took advantage of people’s willingness to trust content shared by friends, over 80 per cent of these scams were shared manually.

Shockingly, India ranked 3rd in Asia for ransomware attacks as well. It saw seven ransomware attacks per hour; 170 per day; about 60,000 in the year. Being the 6th most bot-infected country, about 65% of bot infections of India have been reported in metros.