India still lucrative destination for cyber criminals: Report

Bengaluru: Although India has seen a steady decrease in the amount of spam originating from its land, it continues to rank as the third top source of overall malicious activity, including malware, phishing hosts and bots, a new report said on Thursday.

According to Symantec, global leader in cybersecurity, after ranking sixth in 2014, India now ranks 18th as a source of spam.

However, the country continues to be a top source as well as destination of cyber attacks, said Symantec's "Internet Security Threat Report".

"The report reveals just how lucrative India is for cybercriminals," Tarun Kaura, Symantec director, solution product management for Asia Pacific and Japan, said in a statement.

"In fact, India is the second most favoured destination for Ransomware in Asia with the average number of attacks per day increasing 114 percent to 15 attacks per hour. Almost 10 percent of these attacks were crypto-ransomware posing a threat to consumers and enterprises alike," Kaura added.

November was the busiest month for cybercriminals in India last year, and across the globe an average of 2.5 targeted attacks per day were being aimed at the Indian enterprises in the month.

Last year, India witnessed a 156 percent increase in the percentage of social media scams. Every sixth scam impacted an Indian, making it the most targeted country in Asia and second in the world.

The report also mentioned that new professional cybercriminals are extending the reach of enterprise and consumer threats and fuelling the growth of online crime.

"Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and a highly-skilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off," Kaura noted.

"We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call centre operations to increase the impact of their scams," added.

The report added that globally, one new zero-day vulnerability is discovered on an average every week in 2015 -- that is 54. This is 125 percent increase from the year before.