Cyber attacks from across border on the rise: Here’s how India aims to protect key infrastructure

India faced over 2.12 lakh cybersecurity incidents in January-February 2022 alone. In the year 2021, there were more than 14.02 lakh incidents recorded by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

Here are some more numbers to understand the problem. In the first 3 months of 2022, the country saw over 1.8 crore cyber attacks and threats, as per a report from cybersecurity firm Norton. This comes down to around 200,000 attacks every day.

As per IBM`s X-Force Threat Intelligence team, India is among the top 3 countries in Asia to experience most server access and ransomware attacks in 2021. 

Threat to critical infrastructure from cyber attacks

Nation-state bad actors have significantly increased attacks on critical infra. As per cybersecurity firm Trellix, a 70 percent increase was observed in ransomware activity in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2021 in India.

A good example of such an incident is the recent attack on Oil India’s critical infra in Assam. The attack was planted via a Nigerian server using Russian malware. The hackers demanded $75,00,000.

With such attacks becoming more sophisticated to infiltrate sensitive systems, the scope of work for CERT-In, India’s premier cyber agency, has increased. It was founded back in 2004 under the IT Ministry. Since then, the nature of cyber attacks has transformed significantly. Particularly amid the pandemic, with countries like China, North Korea, Pakistan and others targeting India. More than half of adversarial advanced persistent threat actor activity originated from Russian and Chinese backed groups.

What steps are being taken?

As per recent reports, the government is mulling setting up a specialised Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) to tackle threats to critical infrastructure. VPN providers in the country are also being checked by CERT-In via new rules that require VPN service providers. 

Furthermore, the agency has also told companies to report incidents of cybercrime within six hours. A log of Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems is required to be kept by all government bodies and service providers such as data centres. Data needs to be securely stored for a rolling period of 180 days within the Indian jurisdiction, as per CERT-In.

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(With inputs from IANS)