Ransomware attack is a clear and present danger in India

Days after a global 'ransomware' attack targeted over lakhs of systems in 150 countries, it emerged that India was not as safe from such attacks as reported earlier.

While a report by a cybersecurity firm said that India faced over 48,000 such attacks, another firm said that India is the fifth-most vulnerable country in terms of data breaches, with over 5.11 per cent of global data breaches.

In a statement on Tuesday, cybersecurity company Quick Heal said that of the 48,000 attacks, 60 per cent were faced by enterprises while individuals faced around 40 per cent of the attacks. Kolkata, Delhi, Bhubaneshwar, Pune and Mumbai were the worst-hit cities, while West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi NCR and Odisha were the states that faced the most number of attacks.

Another report by Symantec revealed that India accounted for about 4 per cent of the global ransomware detections.

A cybersecurity expert said on the condition of anonymity that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) advisories have mostly been reactive. "The advisories have come in after the onslaught, and could have been preventive in nature. National agencies, however, have a limited role and companies must employ competent IT professionals and build better firewalls to avoid such attacks," said the expert.

Cheriyan Samuel of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) said that while monitoring of the bitcoin wallets has revealed that not much money has gone to it in India, assessments are still on. "There are ways to stem the problem, while it is difficult to completely stop it even if one pays ransom. One of the ways is to either disable or close a software port called port 445," said Samuel.

Catching a bug

The hacker group responsible for the attack, Shadow Broker’s Gang, has warned of more such attacks. 
The official count of the number of ISPs that have been affected is 2 lakh.