India ranks fourth in cyberthreats

As the risk of cyberthreats looms over enterprises going digital, a Symantec study reveals that India ranks fourth when it comes to online security breaches, accounting for over 5% of global threat detections. The US and China occupy the top two slots and together make for almost 34%, followed by Brazil and then India.

The year 2016 saw a resurgence of the email as an attack channel, multi-million-dollar virtual bank heists, ransomware and new frontiers like IoT and cloud getting exposed to threats. While China has managed to bring down hacks from nearly 24% in 2015 to under 10% in 2016, India saw instances of fraud increase from 3.4% in 2015 to 5.1% in 2016.

"Symantec uncovered evidence linking North Korea to attacks on banks in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ecuador and Poland. This was an incredibly audacious hack and the first time we observed strong indications of nation state involvement in financial cyber crime," said Tarun Kaura, director (solution product management -Asian-Pacific & Japan), Symantec. "While their sights we re set even higher, the attackers stole at least $94 million."

Yahoo's data breaches+ grabbed maximum eyeballs in 2016, after the company said in September that 500 million of its user accounts were compromised in 2014. Within a few months, the company came out with the shocker that over a billion user accounts were compromised making it the largest data breach ever been reported.

Symantec data reveals that in the last eight years, more than 7 billion online identities have been stolen in data breaches. In 2016, more than 1.1 billion identities were stolen in data breaches, almost double the number stolen in 2015 (563 million stolen identities).

The use of email as an infection point also rose, becoming a weapon of choice for cybercriminals and a dangerous threat to users. According to Symantec, 1 in 131 emails contained a malicious link or attachment -- the highest in five years. Business email compromise (BEC) scams, which rely on little more than carefully composed spear-phishing emails -scammed more than $3 billion from businesses over the last three years, targeting more than 400 businesses every day .