April 5, 2018

The U.S. remains most vulnerable to such attacks, followed by China, according to the recently released ‘Internet Security Threat Report’

India emerged as the 3rd most vulnerable country in terms of risk of cyber threats, such as malware, spam & ransomware, in 2017, moving up 1 place over previous year, according to a report by security solutions provider Symantec.

In 2017, 5.09% of the global threats detected were in India, slightly less than 5.11% in 2016. The U.S. (26.61%) was most vulnerable to such attacks, followed by China (10.95%), as per ‘Internet Security Threat Report’.

The global threat ranking is based on 8 metrics — malware, spam, web attacks, phishing, bots, network attacks, ransomware & cryptominers.

According to the report, India continues to be 2nd most impacted by spam & bots, 3rd most impacted by network attacks, & 4th most impacted by ransomware.

This report also pointed out that with the threat landscape becoming more diverse, attackers are working harder to discover new avenues of attack & cover their tracks while doing so.

“From the sudden spread of WannaCry & Petya/NotPetya, to the swift growth in coinminers, 2017 provided us with another reminder that digital security threats can come from new & unexpected sources,” it said.

Cyber criminals, it said, are rapidly adding “cryptojacking” to their arsenal as the ransomware market becomes overpriced and overcrowded.

“Cryptojacking is a rising threat to cyber & personal security,” Tarun Kaura, Director, Enterprise Security Product Management, Asia Pacific & Japan, at Symantec said, adding that, “The massive profit incentive puts people, devices & organisations at risk of unauthorized coinminers siphoning resources from their systems, further motivating criminals to infiltrate everything from home PCs to giant data centers.”

“This coin mining gold rush resulted in an 8,500% increase in detections of coinminers on endpoint computers during the final quarter of 2017.”

While the immediate impact of coin mining is typically performance related - slowing down devices, overheating batteries & in some cases rendering devices unusable - there're broader implications, particularly for organisations. “Corporate networks are at risk of shutdown from coinminers aggressively propagated across their environment. There may also be financial implications for organisations who get billed for cloud CPU usage by coinminers,” Symantec said.

Picture Source :