India's Critical Infrastructure Witnessed 70% Jump In Ransomware Attacks In 2021

Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure by hackers have risen by a whopping 70 percent in Q4 of 2021, according to a report by cybersecurity company Trelix.

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Highlighted by IANS, around 50 percent of adversarial advanced persistent threat actor activity has originated from Russian and Chinese backed groups like APT29 that have been responsible for several attacks in 2022.

Last week¡¯s report revealed that a Russian malware planted from servers in Nigeria was used for a cyber attack on Oil India¡¯s system located in Assam.

The state-owned company has experienced a major attack at its field headquarters in eastern Assam¡¯s Duliajan, with the hacker demanding $75,00,000 as ransom.

According to the report, individual consumers are the top target of cybercriminals, followed by the healthcare sector at around 12 percent of total detections. However, a sharp increase in reports have also been seen in transportation and shipping (27 percent), manufacturing (100 percent rise) and IT industries (36 percent).

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Around 46 percent of the total cyber incidents involved attacks using malware.

Christiaan Beek, lead scientist and principal engineer at Trellix Threat Labs explains, ¡°We are at a critical juncture in cybersecurity and observing increasingly hostile behaviour across an ever-expanding attack surface.¡±

He added that post the shift out of a two-year pandemic which was the most lucrative for cybercriminals, they saw the ¡®Log4Shell¡¯ vulnerability impact hundreds of millions of devices, only to continue cyber momentum in recent years, where they witnessed an escalation of international cyber activity.

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