India has shown some progress in its fight against cyber criminals, with the country witnessing a fall in the number of threats in 2019 compared with 2018.
According to Kaspersky’s KSN (Kaspersky Security Network) reports, 38.8 per cent of the overall Kaspersky users in India saw at least one Web-based attack in 2019 compared with 40.4 per cent in 2018. These threats include file-less malwares, social engineering attacks and other attacks routed through the world wide web.
The local threats or infections detected in India by Kaspersky products in 2019 were around 231,142,762, placing the country at the 69th position worldwide. In 2018, 297,477,131 attacks were detected, placing the country at the 47th position. These attacks usually happen due to a major spread of malware through removable USB drives, CDs, DVDs and other offline methods, the cyber security firm said.
India also ranks 14th worldwide in the number of attacks caused by servers that were hosted within the country, which accounted for 8,064,950 incidents in 2019.
“We did see a decrease in the number of adware and malware attacks in India; however, there has been a huge increase in riskware attacks from 28 per cent in 2018 to 39 per cent in 2019. The presence of riskware on your machine will allow threat actors to use that legitimate application for malicious purposes,” said Saurabh Sharma, Senior Security Researcher, Global Research and Analysis Team, Asia Pacific at Kaspersky.
The cyber security firm has recorded incidents in which legitimate remote administration programmes such as WinVNC were secretly installed to obtain full remote access to a computer. Other examples of riskware include file downloader, software for monitoring computer activity and internet server services such as FTP, web proxy and telnet.
Importance of the Indian market
“India would always be a focus market for me in South Asia, and is currently among the top five markets in Asia Pacific. Most of the strategies that we are designing are keeping India as the core market. This is because, if you look at the neighbouring countries, the trend in the last three years has been that whatever India has adopted has eventually been adopted by the neighbouring countries as well. So, if we taste success in India, the success automatically trickles down to the neighbouring countries in South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives,” said Dipesh Kaura, General Manager for South Asia, Kaspersky.
Explaining that every part of India has different business sectors, different ways of doing business and different sets of channel partners focused on those particular lines of businesses, he said: “ We have designed our GTM (go-to-market) strategy for 2020 with a region-based approach. We are empowering channel partners in these regions with with training, certification, back-end support and with threat intelligence, as our business is 100 per cent channel-led.”
Asked about the addressable market opportunity for Kaspersky in India, he said the India market for cyber security solutions is estimated to be $3 billion by 2022.
Kaspersky recorded revenue of $726 million in 2018 and revenues from the APAC region grew 6 per cent in 2018. Its revenue for 2019 are yet to be disclosed. The cyber security firm works with Interpol and Europol, and secures smart cities across the globe. It is heavily invested in industrial cyber security, where it monitors the threat landscape for industries and protects the ICS (industrial control systems) of these industries. It has already executed more than seven large ICS projects globally.
“We have moved on from the early stages when security was restricted to anti-virus to new-age technologies, dynamic threats, signature-less attacks, unseen detection methodologies and APT (advanced persistent threat). We have a strong research team, and in the last four months, we are the only organisation that has picked up three zero day attacks,” said Kaura.
Source: The Hindu
