New Delhi: Health care saw the highest number of attacks among all sectors in India, with an organization in India being attacked 1,866 times per week on average in 2022, according to a new study by Checkpoint Investigation. The three most targeted industries in India were healthcare, followed by education, research and government, and the military.
The Check Point Research study also found that global cyber attacks increased by 38 percent in 2022, compared to 2021.
The figure was driven by smaller, more nimble hackers and ransomware gangs, which focused on exploiting collaboration tools used in work-from-home environments, targeting educational institutions that switched to e-learning post-Covid.
“Several cyber threat trends are happening at the same time. For one thing, the ransomware ecosystem continues to evolve and grow with smaller, more nimble criminal groups forming to evade law enforcement. Second, hackers are expanding their targeting to target business collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, OneDrive, and Google Drive with phishing exploits,” said Omer Dembinsky, Data Group Manager at Check Point Software.
“These constitute a rich source of sensitive data as most employees in organizations continue to work remotely. Third, academic institutions have become a popular breeding ground for cybercriminals following the rapid digitization that Undertaken in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Dembinsky. aggregate.
Globally, the education/research sector was the most attacked industry, with a 43% increase in attacks during 2021.
The report said that hackers like to target hospitals because they perceive them as short of cyber security resources with smaller hospitals particularly vulnerable as they are underfunded and insufficiently staffed to run a sophisticated cyber attack.
The healthcare sector is also lucrative for hackers, as their goal is to recover health insurance information, medical record numbers, and sometimes even social security numbers with direct threats from ransomware gangs to patients, demanding payment under the threat of patient records being released.
Additionally, with AI technologies becoming more available to people, cyber-attacks are likely to increase as hackers are able to generate malicious code and email at a faster and more automated rate.
