Over 829 million cyber attacks blocked in Q4, 59% in India: report

More than 829 million cyber attacks were blocked during the fourth quarter (Q4) of the calendar year 2022, globally, of which 59% of the websites were in India, suggests a report from application security company Indusface.

The report mentioned a sharp rise in the intensity and frequency of DDoS and bot attacks in Q4 compared to Q3.

"In this quarter, we saw almost 20 applications of a healthcare customer get targeted by DDoS attacks. We also saw a SaaS application hit with a 2TB attack. In both cases, the attacks were quickly thwarted with AI sending out anomaly alerts and a managed services team deploying surgical rules," said Ashish Tandon Founder and chief executive officer, Indusface.


The report says that mid-market companies with revenues between $10 million and $1 billion have been subjected to 45% of the cyberattacks, and only 21% were large enterprises with over $1 billion in revenue.

Small businesses, on the other hand, accounted for 34% of attacks, implying that every business is vulnerable to such attacks.

However, the ability to create custom rules has stood out as a key enabler of cyber security.

On an average, each enterprise deploys 48 custom rules, and 60% of all attacks were blocked using these custom rules, according to the report.

The report also highlights the increase in 'virtual patching' as a measure to protect applications at the Web Application Firewall level.

DDoS attacks affected 32% of all apps during the last 60 days of the observation period, said the report.

The top three segments vulnerable to the attacks were banking, insurance, and other finance companies, followed by IT services and manufacturing companies.

SaaS/IT products and Retail/e-commerce also have a decent representation of 9% each.

In terms of region, 59% of the websites were in India, with the remaining 23% in the US and Canada, the report added.