Cyberattacks concentrating on India-based organizations proceed to double year-over-year, a charge far greater than the worldwide common, highlighting the quickly rising threat going through firms and authorities companies in South Asia.
General, organizations in India encountered practically 1.2 billion assaults within the third quarter of 2024, up from about 600 million in the identical quarter in 2023, in keeping with a quarterly report revealed by Indusface, a managed software safety supplier. Some 377 million denial-of-service (DoS) occasions and 215 million bot-based requests focused API companies and Internet servers using the agency’s Internet software and API safety (WAAP) service.
Whereas attackers usually have used denial-of-service (DoS) assaults powered by bots towards companies, they’re evolving, Ashish Tandon, founder and CEO of Indusface, mentioned in an announcement to Darkish Studying.
Attackers at the moment are focusing “on exploiting web sites and APIs utilizing various assault vectors,” he mentioned. “The rise of enormous language fashions (LLMs) has considerably lowered the barrier for executing vulnerability assaults, as mirrored in our knowledge, which exhibits triple-digit progress in such incidents.”
The third-largest financial system in Asia, India noticed 5.4% progress general within the third quarter, which is driving attackers to extra typically goal Indian organizations — 44% of companies have suffered an information breach costing a minimum of $500,000 prior to now three years, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in its “2025 World Digital Belief Insights” (India version). The assaults have resulted in Indian executives prioritizing cybersecurity over different dangers, with 61% designating it one in all their prime three priorities.
“Prime cyber-risks, together with cloud-related threats, assaults on linked merchandise, social engineering and software program provide chain compromises, are areas the place safety executives really feel significantly underprepared,” PwC India said within the report.
Cyberattacks in India Accelerating
Within the second quarter of 2024, cyberattacks doubled each globally and towards India-based organizations, rising 105% and 115%, respectively, Indusface said. Whereas the variety of cyberattacks continued to balloon within the third quarter, the enlargement decelerated globally, rising solely 26% within the third quarter of 2024, in contrast with a yr earlier.
In India, nevertheless, assaults continued to skyrocket, leaping 92% in comparison with the identical quarter the earlier yr, the corporate said in its “State of Software Safety” report for Q3 2024. In August, the Reserve Financial institution of India (RBI) issued a warning to firms that their growing use of digitization comes with elevated dangers.
“Whereas the DDoS assaults in India [were] just like the final yr, there was an enormous progress within the bot and vulnerability assaults in India,” the corporate said, including that assaults typically have been on the rise due to attackers’ use of AI instruments.
“A giant a part of [the increase] might be due to the widespread use of LLM instruments reminiscent of ChatGPT, which allow novice hackers to simply discover and deploy scripts that might exploit open vulnerabilities,” the corporate mentioned. “This accessibility has lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals, leading to an unprecedented rise in vulnerability exploitation.”
Cyber-Dangers Heightened for Banks, Utilities
Cyberattackers have tended to focus on particular industries in India, with the banking, monetary companies, and insurance coverage industries collectively seeing twice as many assaults in contrast with the worldwide common, whereas energy and power noticed 4 instances as many assaults per web site, Indusface said in its report.
“We imagine that these industries are focused for geopolitical causes, as it will result in disruption in all important companies,” says Phani Deepak Akella, vice chairman of promoting for Indusface. He provides, “Final yr, we noticed extra DDoS assaults, however this yr we’re seeing extra progress in assaults concentrating on vulnerabilities. This might be due to LLM adoption, the place hackers can prepare made scripts to take advantage of vulnerabilities reminiscent of SQL injection, for instance.”
Corporations in India undergo from most of the identical points as companies worldwide, particularly round managing vulnerabilities of their assault floor space. Solely 19% of firms use an automatic scanner to handle their API safety, with 45% utilizing guide penetration testing and greater than a 3rd (36%) not testing their APIs, in keeping with Indusface.
As well as, firms are gradual to patch vulnerabilities within the software program used to serve APIs, with greater than 30% of important and high-severity CVSS vulnerabilities remaining unpatched greater than six months after discovery. Some 5 million assaults focused the susceptible API companies, the agency famous.
Safety misconfiguration and identification and authentication failures have been the highest lessons of vulnerabilities found in manufacturing API servers, in keeping with the agency’s report. Internet purposes usually had blind SQL injection, server-side request forgery, and HTML injection points.