Hyderabad: India, the country with the second most cyber attacks during the 2022, is now in fifth position, with Europe climbing to the second highest with 14 percent of attacks. Attacks increase in the United States putting it top on the table in terms of different forms of cyber attacks, revealed the Microsoft Digital Defence Report 2023. US entities have continued to be primary targets for DDoS attacks, bearing the brunt of 54 percent of all attacks.
India which reported around 25 per cent of attacks last year has reported less than five per cent this year, the report found. A "Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack aims to overwhelm the targeted devices, services, and network with fake internet traffic, making them inaccessible to or useless for genuine users.
India also remains in third position in terms of threat actors’ priority in the Asia-Pacific region, followed by Korea and Taiwan. Ukraine is the top European target, driven by Russian state actors’ invasion-related operations. Israel remains by far the most-targeted country in the Middle East and North Africa region as a result of Iran’s extensive focus there. North Korean and Chinese state actors drove South Korea and Taiwan to the first and second most targeted in the Asia-Pacific.
The report also found that North Korea is particularly interested in spying on institutions and individuals that study North Korea itself and also targeting the national defence industries of various countries. While India accounts for seven percent of these attacks, Russia is on the top with most attacks, followed together by the USA and Israel.
India is also among the ten Asia-Pacific nations that have revitalised their focus on regulation of critical infrastructure.
Surprisingly, North Korea provides material support for Russia’s war in Ukraine in exchange for food, its cyber actors are targeting Russian nuclear energy, defence industry, and government entities, for intelligence collection.
