Cyberattacks grew 22% on India’s IoT deployments in Q2

With 22% jump in cyberattacks on Internet of Things (IoT) deployments in the country, India was the most attacked nation in the IoT space last quarter, said a new report released here on Friday. This was the second consecutive quarter that the country topped the cyber attack victims list.

Smart cities, financial services and transportation sectors led the sectoral rankings in terms of the attacks, said the report titled "State of Internet of Things (IoT) Security".

Among the 15 Indian cities from which data was gathered, Mumbai, New Delhi and Bengaluru are attracting the maximum number of cyberattacks, revealed the study by Bengaluru-headquartered telecom solutions provider Subex.

During the quarter, the researchers registered 33,450 high-grade attacks, 500 of which were very high sophistication.

"The threat intelligence compiled points to a high level of hacker interest in projects in India and this is indeed a matter of concern," P. Vinod Kumar, CEO, Subex, said in a statement.

The research revealed that a range of sophisticated malware is being deployed by hackers to target critical infrastructure projects and there has been a significant rise in reconnaissance attacks.

The study identified over 2,550 unique malware samples in the country. Internet of Things (IoT) projects are being targeted at the proof of concept stages itself and many malware samples isolated showed a tendency to persist and listen to the network traffic.

Increase in the number of attacks with geopolitical motivation is also a trend, the study reported.