India faces high web application attack risk: Report

Bengaluru: India ranked fourth on the list of top target countries for Web Application Attacks and 10th in the list of "Global Web Application Attack Source Countries" in the fourth quarter of 2016, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

According to the report by content delivery network service Akamai Technologies, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks -- greater than 100 Gbps -- increased 140 per cent year-over-year from the fourth quarter of 2015.

DDoS is a type of attack where multiple compromised systems are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. 

The largest DDoS attack in fourth quarter last year which peaked at 517 Gbps came from Spike -- a non-IoT botnet that has been around for more than two years and seven of the 12 mega attacks -- those with traffic greater than 100 Gbps -- were directly attributed to Mirai.

"As we saw with the Mirai botnet attacks during the third quarter, unsecured Internet of Things (IoT) devices continued to drive significant DDoS attack traffic," Martin McKeay, senior security advocate and senior editor, `State of the Internet/Security Report`, said in a statement.

The number of IP addresses involved in DDoS attacks grew significantly fourth quarter of 2016, despite DDoS attack totals dropping overall. 

The US sourced the most IP addresses participating in DDoS attacks - more than 180,000.

"With the predicted exponential proliferation of these devices, threat agents will have an expanding pool of resources to carry out attacks, validating the need for companies to increase their security investments," McKeay added.

Meanwhile, the US remained the top source country for web application attacks, showing a 72 per cent increase from third quarter of 2016, followed by Brazil and Germany.