New Delhi (Sputnik): A recent study conducted by a Finnish cybersecurity company revealed that India had been the target of over 400,000 cyber attacks from locations across five countries including China, Russia, and the US between January and June 2018. The study further claims that in comparison only around 73,000 attacks were initiated from India in the same period.
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Hackers in Russia, the US, China, the Netherlands, and Germany targeted India with 436,090 attacks. This is nearly 12 times more than the cyber attacks which originated from India, according to F-Secure's honeypot data.
Going by the same data, Russia accounted for most cyber attacks on India (255,589), followed by the US (103,458), China (42,544), the Netherlands (19,169) and 15,330 attacks from Germany. On the other hand, the top five countries that were targeted by Indian cyber attackers were Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, and Ukraine, a total of 36,563.
"The relatively higher number of inbound attacks on Indian honeypots reflects how the fast-digitizing country is becoming more lucrative for global cybercriminals," Leszek Tasiemski, Vice President of cyber security products R&D at F-Secure said in a statement while releasing the data.
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Cyber experts say that for India to cement its cyber alertness, it will have to promote its young minds who are pioneers in ethical hacking and counter cyber attacks.
"The new age warfare is being fought on the cyberspace. The foolproof IT ecosystem has to be checked continuously and also proper offensive undertaken if the country has to be protected. India is blessed with brilliant minds that are pioneers world over in IT surveillance and security. But the country lacks a robust program to promote ethical hackers and to encourage them to work in counter cyber operations," Rizwan Shaikh, Indian Information Security, and Cyber Crime Consultant told Sputnik.
The views and opinions expressed by in this article are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect Sputnik's position.