DNS attacks:India among top 3 affected nations in Asia

New Delhi: A new report by EfficientIP, a leading provider of network security and automation solutions on Monday suggested that India is among the top 3 Asian countries to experience a significant rise in DNS (domain name system) attacks in 2021 to date.

Nearly 90 per cent of organisations globally saw DNS attacks, with the average cost of each attack around $950,000, the report showed on Monday.

Asia recorded an increase of 15 per cent in the average cost of a DNS attack, incurring a cost of $908,140, up from $792,840 the previous year.

The sharpest hike in damages was experienced by Malayisa which reported an increase of 78 per cent while India which saw a significant increase of 32 per cent from last year,

The report conducted in collaboration with the IDC showed that organisations across all industries suffered an average of 7.6 attacks this past year amid the pandemic.

Around a quarter of companies have suffered a DNS attack abusing cloud misconfiguration, with almost half of companies (47 per cent) suffering cloud service downtime as a result of DNS attacks.

"As workers look to more permanently transition to off-premise sites, making use of cloud, IoT, edge and 5G, companies and telecom providers should look to DNS for a proactive security strategy," said Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP.

This year, phishing also continued to grow in popularity (49 per cent of companies experienced phishing attempts), as did malware-based attacks (38 per cent), and traditional DDoS attacks (29 per cent).

"While it is positive that companies want to use DNS to protect their increasingly remote workforces, organisations are continuing to suffer the costly impacts of DNS attacks," said Romain Fouchereau, Research Manager European Security at IDC.