This July, MediaNama held an open house discussion on Securing Online Data, supported by Microsoft and Akamai. This is Part 1 of our coverage of the discussion, which looks into emerging cyber threats in India and how well Indian users/companies are equipped while handling cyber attacks, based on presentations from Bruno Goveas, Director, Business Development (APAC & Japan) at Akamai, and Manish Tiwari, Chief Information Security Advisor at Microsoft. Types of new age Cyber threats According to Bruno Goveas, Director, Business Development (APAC & Japan) at Akamai, 31% of malicious IP addresses that attack the company’s India customers are coming from outside the country. Web-based attacks are the most prevalent because hackers don’t want you to know that you are breached, they want you to know only after it's too late. Among this (web attacks), credential checking stuff is getting to be a big problem of late”. The most prevalent types of attacks (ranked as Per Akamai) include: i) Web attackers ii) Scanning tools iii) Web Scrapers/Bots iv)DoS Denial of Service) attacks Manish Tiwari, Chief Information Security Advisor at Microsoft said “almost 3 lakh new villages will be digitized...because of the national fiber network program which the government is driving. With this, the need for cyber security also increases. There is a tendency of organized crime, moving into cyberspace. We have seen the case of the Cron as well as other Ruby (based) malware attacks targeting Android systems. Cron was an a ttack reported in Russia against the banking system, and Ruby is a…
