India witnesses drop in cyber threats in 2019: Report

India witnessed a fall in the number of cyber threats in 2019 as compared to 2018, said a new report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky on Tuesday.

According to the firm, India has shown positive progress in their fight against cybercriminals and 38.8 per cent of the overall Kaspersky users in the country were attacked at least once by a web-based attacks in 2019 as compared to 2018 when it stood at 40.4 per cent.

"In my opinion, cybersecurity is the most troubled area for any large enterprise. With our comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity solutions, we are in a position to help organisations to mitigate or respond to any kind of dynamic threats," Dipesh Kaura, General Manager for South Asia, Kaspersky, said in a statement.

The threats include file-less malwares, social engineering attacks and other attacks that were targeted through the world wide web.

The total number of unique threats detected by Kaspersky products in the year 2019 were 142,250,268.

According to Kaspersky's KSN reports, from 2018 and 2019, there has been a moderate decrease in the number of attacks targeted at India.

"In India, we did see a decrease in the number of adware and malware attacks, however there has been a huge increase in riskware attacks from 28 per cent in 2018 to 39 per cent in 2019. The presence of riskware on your machine will allow threat actors to use that legitimate application for malicious purpose," said Saurabh Sharma, Senior Security Researcher, Global Research and Analysis Team Asia Pacific (GReAT APAC).

The cybersecurity firm has recorded incidents in which legitimate, remote administration programmes such as WinVNC, which has been secretly installed in order to obtain full remote access to a computer.IANS