India ‘scores high’ on list of malware-attacked nations, beats China
HYDERABAD: Users in India were among the few nationals in the world who were most attacked by banking malwares in 2018, revealed a Kaspersky report on the financial cyberattacks perpetrated last year.
Banking malware refers to banking Trojans, that are designed to steal the credentials used to access online banking. The report ‘Financial Cyberthreats in 2018’ by the antivirus giants, found that apart from India, users in Russia, Germany, India, Vietnam, Italy, United States of America and China were also the most affected.
While India’s share of users attacked by banking malwares stood at 4 per cent, Russia and Germany took the majority of hits with 22 per cent and 21 per cent of all attacks respectively. “In 2017, Germany led the way followed by Russia and China. In 2018, Russia has outrun Germany. And India has done the same to China, closing in the top three. The latter at the same time dropped to the seventh position,” said the report.
Who were these users? The report shows that though 76 per cent of the victims were consumers, there has been a steady increase in attacks on businesses and corporates. “We see that for the last three years, one in five banking malware attacks was focused on the corporate sector. The reason behind this is clear – while attacks on consumers will only give a criminal access to banking or payment system accounts, successful hits on employees will also compromise a company’s financial resources,” it added.
Also noted that there have been an increase in diverse malware attacks which were categorised as others, ‘which more than doubled, indicating that the financial threat landscape is becoming more and more diverse’.