An organisation in Asia Pacific suffers from 1245 weekly cyberattacks: CPR Report

Cybersecurity has become a pain point for organisations across the globe in recent times. Dozens of reports in the past have detailed that cyber-criminals have intensified their attack since working-from-home became a norm. Reports have also detailed how ransomware attacks and malware attacks have become prevalent in the past couple of months. Now, a new report shed light on the cyber-health of organisations in the Asia-Pacific region in the past month.

According to a report by Check Point Research, there has been a whopping 168% year-on-year increase in the number of cyberattacks in May this year in the Asia-Pacific region. The report also says that there was a 53% increase in cyber-attacks between April and May this year. While cyber-attackers used a number of tactics, which increased over time, ransomware and Remote Access Trojan (RAT) showed the highest spike in the month of May this year in the APAC region. As per the report, the use of these tactics to target individuals and organisations increased by 26% in the month of May compared to last year. This was followed by banking trojans and info-stealers which showed a 10% increase.

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As far as the affected countries are concerned Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Taiwan remained the most affected countries in May this year compared to April 2021. These countries witnessed an increase of 40%, 30%, 25%, 22% and 17% respectively as far as the cyberattacks are concerned. Indonesia witnessed the highest number of weekly attacks. On average, it witnessed 3,311 per week in the month of May. This was followed by Taiwan with 2,523 average weekly attacks, Malaysia with 986 average weekly attacks, Singapore with 792 average weekly attacks and Japan with 558 average weekly attacks.

India, on the other hand, witnessed an increase of just 1% as far as the cyber-attacks compared to April 2021 are concerned. It saw an average of 1,749 weekly attacks last month.

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Coming to the affected industries, utilities, ISP and software companies remained the prime targets of the cyber-criminals in the past month. They witnessed a 39%, 12% and 6% increase in cyber-attacks compared to April 2021. As far as average weekly attacks are concerned, they witnessed 1590, 1794 and 500 attacks per week respectively.

“The recent new wave of work from home initiatives being imposed by various authorities in APAC means more security gaps are now available for attackers to leverage...The pandemic has also impacted the economic landscape, having reduced the growth of leading Asian economies...Also, when looking at the popularity of APAC as a target for attackers, it is important to consider the snowball effect. The more successful attacks take place in the region, the more other attackers would want to follow suit, especially since they know they have a higher chance of succeeding in the attack,” CPR wrote in its report.