NEW DELHI: India, US, Indonesia, and China accounted for 45% of whole cyberattacks on authorities companies worldwide within the second half of 2022, in accordance with a report by cybersecurity agency CloudSek, launched Friday. The variety of assaults on authorities companies had been up 95% year-on-year, the report claims.
India was probably the most focused nation in 2022 as assaults on authorities companies greater than doubled. CloudSek attributed this to a rise in actions of Malaysia-based hacktivist group Dragon Force, which ran campaigns equivalent to #OpIndia and #OpsPatuk in opposition to India in retaliation to the controversial feedback by an Indian politician on Prophet Mohammed.
Another hacker group Khalifah Cyber Crew intensified assaults on India in protest in opposition to alleged “Muslim discrimination” by the federal government, the report stated.
Hacktivism is a type of cyberattack the place the hacker’s motivation just isn’t monetary beneficial properties however to advertise a political agenda or protest in opposition to sure insurance policies. Last 12 months, assaults on China additionally elevated as a consequence of its aggressive stance in direction of Taiwan and the Uyghur group.
Attacks on authorities companies in China declined to 4.5% of all assaults from 13.10% final 12 months. On the opposite hand, in India, US, and Indonesia, the share of all assaults grew from 6.3% to 13.7%, 7.4% to 9.6%, and 4.6% to 9.3%, respectively,
In 2022, hacktivism accounted for 9% of the cyberattacks on the federal government sector.
In addition to hacktivism, authorities companies in India are additionally more and more being focused by phishing campaigns, in accordance with the report.
CloudSek additionally discovered that ransomware teams had been very energetic and accounted for six% of the assaults on governments. LockBIT, which offers ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) was probably the most outstanding ransomware operator. Its targets this 12 months embrace authorities companies within the US, Canada, and Italy. In November, a Russian nationwide was arrested in Canada for alleged involvement in LockBIT ransomware campaigns within the US.
Last month, India’s prime government-run hospital All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) was additionally hit by a cyberattack inflicting disruption of on-line providers that lasted over two weeks.
India’s nodal cybersecurity company Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) present in its investigation that 5 AIIMS’ servers had been compromised in the course of the assault and practically 1.3 terabytes of information was encrypted by hackers.
“The ratio of government-sponsored assaults has additionally multiplied; nevertheless, there isn’t any precise determine for this improve since these assaults are principally untraceable. This progress could be primarily attributed to the arrival of RaaS fashions,” CloudSek said.
Attacks on Russia increased 600% in 2022 in retaliation to its invasion of Ukraine, making it the fifth most targeted country.
Cyberattacks on government agencies are not new. Many of these attacks state sponsored and are aimed at stealing sensitive information or cripple critical infrastructure of other countries. Indian entities are often targeted by hacker groups with links to China. Similarly, many of the attacks on US agencies often originate from Russia or North Korea.
According to IBM’s ‘Cost of Data Breach Report 2022’, the average cost of data breaches in the government sector has increased from $1.93 million in 2021 to $2.07 million this year.
Experts believe that state-sponsored hackers will go after cloud services next year due to growing digital transformation. “Nation states will begin to target cloud service provider (CSP) managed services as companies migrate more of their attack surface to these managed services,” stated Bob Huber, chief safety officer at Tenable, a cybersecurity agency.
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