New Delhi, February 8: Nearly two in five (33 per cent) web users in India faced a form of Internet-born cyberattack in 2023, a new report revealed on Thursday. According to the global cybersecurity company Kaspersky, a total of 62,574,546 Internet-borne cyberthreats were detected and blocked in the country.

"With the world moving towards AI and other next-gen technologies, we expect the fraud and scamming scenarios to get more intricate and challenging to detect. Thus, we urge Indian users to install security solutions on their devices to protect themselves from these web attacks," said Jaydeep Singh, General Manager for South Asia at Kaspersky. Google Starts New ‘Enhanced Fraud Protection’ Programme With Google Play Protect To Help Android Users Better Shield From Financial Fraud Attacks.

The report also revealed that cyberattacks via browsers and social engineering are the most prevalent methods of web infection. Cybercriminals often exploit the vulnerabilities in browsers and their plugins to penetrate the user systems. Users are typically attacked when they visit an infected website. This occurs without the user's awareness or action, and may result in the download of harmful file-less malware, the researchers explained.

Another popular web threat in India and around the world is 'social engineering' to defraud users. In social engineering, the user is manipulated by the cybercriminal to download a malicious file and give control of the system to the criminal. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Highlights Role of Indian Developers in Global AI Innovation, Says India Is the Fastest-Growing Market on GitHub.

Cybercriminals often trick their victims into thinking they are downloading a legitimate application or programme, and then once the user downloads the programme, they control the victim's device and use it for malicious purposes. "Since many threat actors nowadays conceal malicious code to bypass static analysis and emulation, advanced technologies such as proactive Machine Language-based methods and behaviour analysis are used to fight this type of threat," Singh said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 08, 2024 06:40 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).