India has emerged as the second most targeted country globally in terms of cyberattacks, with 95 Indian entities falling victim to data theft incidents in 2024. According to a recent report by cyber intelligence firm CloudSEK, the US ranked first with 140 targeted entities, while Israel took third place, with 57 entities affected by cyberattacks.
The ThreatLandscape Report 2024 by CloudSEK, based on dark web data monitoring, provides a detailed overview of the countries most affected by cyberattacks. The report reveals that India’s rapid digitization has made it a prime target for malicious cyber activities. It also highlights that the nation’s sectors, including finance, banking, government, telecommunications, healthcare, and education, were among the most targeted.
Sectors Most Affected By Cyberattacks In India
Incidents hit finance and banking the most at 20 cases of data breaches. Followed by this, government records also received quite significant attention as their breaches summed to 13, telecommunications reached 12 breaches, healthcare and pharma summed 10 cases of breach. Significant breaches of educational sector incidents amounted to nine.
It further lists the biggest data breaches in India for 2024. The most massive breach of records involved leaked Indian citizen data to the tune of 850 million records of Hi-Tek Group. Also, customer data of Star Health and Allied Insurance and 2TB of sensitive data of Telecommunications Consultants India got breached. This makes a lot of threat for both personal as well as corporate data security in India.
Ransomware Attacks On The Rise
There have been quite a number of ransomware attacks in India. As many as 108 known ransomware incidents have been reported in the country. The most active ransomware group was the Lockbit group, which had carried out over 20 attacks. Killsec and Ransomhub ransomware groups also carried out several attacks with more than 15 and 12 attacks, respectively.
ALSO READ | OpenAI’s o3 AI Model Shows Human-Level Benchmark Score, But Is It Truly That Intelligent?
