Vigorous Cyber attacks coming from China after the Galwan valley clash in India

New Delhi: A recent report from Maharashtra Cyber cell and CPC claimed that after the clash between two army troops near Galwan valley along the LAC in Ladakh, hackers based in China are doing cyber attacks over several different sectors in India.

India is one of the top 5 most targeted countries online and most of these cyberattacks come from countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Korea. And these attacks have increased over the recent period of time.

Siddharth Vishwanath, Partner, and Leader, Cyber Security, PwC India said in an official statement that “Typically inbound attacks on India originate from China, Russia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Korea. Our Cyber Protection Center (CPC) has recorded attacks from these countries over a period of time,”.

Types of Cyber Attacks

According to a Niti-Ayog report, phishing and social engineering attacks form 57% of all followed by malware attacks at 41%, spear-phishing at 30%, DoS at 20%, and ransomware at 19%.

In this whole period of lockdown and Covid-19 pandemic, hackers are taking more advantage of the situation.the cybercriminals sent phishing emails in the form of an important update’ or under the garb of false cure, false advice, false medication to extract money. Such emails can be malware, trojan, or ransomware aiming to launch an organization-wide attack.

As per the recent PwC report on the ‘COVID-19 crisis, the impact of cybersecurity on Indian organizations,’ several fake versions of the ‘PM CARES’ site has emerged to target Indians. According to the Home Ministry officials, over 8000 complaints were received from Indians at home and abroad who had been fooled into donating to such fake websites and portals.

Coronavirus-themed malware-laden spam emails were used to distribute malware and Trojans, especially the Emotet banking Trojan. Phishing emails were designed as communication from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to steal email credentials.

Types of sectors targeted by the hackers

These phishing emails targeted manufacturing, finance, transportation, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Attacks on banking, defense, and manufacturing sectors were also notably at large. As per the case study of PwC, many Indian organizations have seen a sudden 100% increase in attacks between 17th Feb and 20th Feb 2020, 66% increase in March, and 100% increase in brute force attacks at the end of March 2020.

The data breaches cost organizations in India roughly between $100 million to $200 million per year. While in 2019, the average cost of data breaches in India stood at $119 million, as per a PwC report.

What Maharashtra Cyber Cell has to say?

Hackers based in China attempted over 40,000 cyber attacks in India’s Information Technology Infrastructure and banking sector in the last 7 days, a higher ranked police official in Maharashtra said on Tuesday.

Maharashtra Cyber’, the state police’s cyber wing, collated information about these attempts and most of them were found to have originated in Chengdu area in China, he said.

“According to our information at least 40,300 cyber attacks were attempted in the last four-five days on the resources in Indian cyberspace,” he said.

These attacks were in the form if DOS( Denial of services), DDOS (Distributed Denial of service, Hijacking of Internet Protocol and Phishing, he added.

Indian Internet users have to pay proper attention and be aware of any type of fraudulent and phishing mails claming to be of covid-19 treatment tests or any kind of donation of charity. As such emails may contain fake test-report PDFs with proper payload inserted into it, which can further lead to compromisation of his/her computer system.

Companies and industries should create robust ‘firewalls’ and conduct cybersecurity audits from many of the Indian cybersecurity assistant companies which provide the vulnerabilities report and type of breaches if occurred in recent times to their company. One of them are: Lucideus , Cybrary, etc

You can also protect yourself from reading our cybersecurity-related articles.

Sometimes we include links to online retail stores and/or online campaigns. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.