Over 3.6 lakh cyber attacks have been launched on various Indian companies over the past half year. This was research that was done by CyberPeace Foundation, an organisation for a free and safe internet along with two other similar organisations.
Over the past six months, since the month of October, until now, Indian oil companies both private and public have been plagued by cyber attacks and hacking. One of the worst ones was on Oil India Limited’s Assam’s office.
The company that is partly owned by the government announced that a group of hackers were able to breach their system and ended up leaving a ransom note which demanded $7.5 million dollars (over Rs. 57 crores). This attack took place just a few days ago.
The study was partly funded and run by e-Kawach wing of the CyberPeace Foundation to understand the leaks, gaps, and weaknesses of India’s digital framework and security. They even processed data to understand the internet traffic they receive and how to optimize it to make it smooth for everyone.
e-Kawach is an initiative of the CyberPeace Foundation as they work together with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to initiate two dozen honeypots across the nation.
A honeypot is a system that is initiated that track and analyses a cyber infrastructure to evaluate its security and find out what kind of threats they face. Using this data, the Indian government can assess how they can improve their framework so sensitive data doesn’t get leaked and none of their systems get compromised.
A massive 3.6 lakh attacks in just six months does not bode well for the government. The month of October had 11,763 attempts and except for the month of December, that number has just been rising and rising. In just January of this year, over 52,000 attacks were reported, while in March that number was close to 70,000.
The report also said that the hackers used software like FTP and Modbus to hack into the Indian systems.
Not only has this been going on, but there has been a scam making the rounds on WhatsApp where people received a fabricated employment offer from Indian Oil with a link attached and it takes you to a third-party server.
India really need to crackdown on these cyber-attacks as data and tech is the new gold and they need to protected with utmost priority. If they don’t then India will compromised soon.