India 4th as web attacks on the rise globally: Report

Bengaluru: India ranked fourth in the list of top 10 target countries for Web Application Attacks as bot-driven abuse and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks continued to rise from November 2017 till April this year, Cloud delivery network provider Akamai Technologies said on Wednesday.

Registering over 2.8 crore attacks, India also ranked eighth globally in the list of Web Application Attack source countries.

Cybersecurity defenders face increasing threats from organisations in the form of bot-based credential abuse targeting the hospitality industry and advanced DDoS attacks, said the "Summer 2018 State of the Internet/ Security: Web Attack report".

Geographic analysis of attack traffic origination revealed that Russia, China and Indonesia were major sources of credential abuse for the travel industry, directing about half of their credential abuse activity at hotels, cruise lines, airlines, and travel sites.

Akamai researchers analysed nearly 112 billion bot requests and 3.9 billion malicious login attempts that targeted sites in the travel industry, including airlines, cruise lines and hotels among others.

"These countries have historically been large centers for cyber attacks, but the attractiveness of the hospitality industry appears to have made it a significant target for hackers to carry out bot-driven fraud," said Martin McKeay, Senior Security Advocate, Akamai.

Akamai measured a 16 per cent increase in the number of DDoS attacks recorded since last year.

The report highlighted the importance of maintaining agility not only by security teams but also by developers, network operators and service providers in order to mitigate new threats.