India second only to Japan in Asia Pacific in cyberattacks faced in 2020

New Delhi: India was second only to Japan in Asia Pacific in number of cyberattacks faced in 2020, accounting for 7% of all attacks in the region, according to an IBM report released on Wednesday.

Finance and insurance emerged as the most vulnerable sectors, followed by manufacturing and professional services, according to the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index released by IBM Security. Ransomware was the top attack type, making up roughly 40% of all cyberattacks. In addition, digital currency mining and server access attacks hit Indian companies last year.

"We also witnessed cybercriminals using relief efforts and public health information as spam lures including targeted attacks on critical components of the vaccine supply chain. These all remain issues in 2021," Sudeep Das, security software technical sales leader at IBM Technology Sales (India/South Asia), said in a statement. "Hence, organisations need to harden their cloud environments with a zero-trust approach to their security strategy and leverage AI to monitor, detect and contextualize dynamic behaviors and movements across hybrid cloud environments, to verify the legitimacy (or lack of) of a threat and automate a response."


The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index is based on insights and observations from monitoring over 150 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries.

In addition, data is gathered and analysed from multiple sources within IBM, including IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence and Incident Response, X-Force Red, IBM Managed Security Services, and data provided by Quad9 and Intezer, both of which contributed to the 2021 report.

The report revealed that the most successful way victim environments were accessed last year was scanning and exploiting for vulnerabilities, surpassing phishing for the first time in years.

Europe experienced more attacks than any other region in 2020, with ransomware rising as the top culprit.

In addition, Europe saw more insider threat attacks than any other region, seeing twice as many such attacks as North America and Asia combined.