More virus-bearing emails target Indian SMEs: Report

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Saurabh Gupta | 30 Apr, 2013
Designed to steal data, phishing and virus-bearing emails are increasingly hitting Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs), said Symantec Corp.'s, Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 18 (ISTR) released on Monday.

"An indicator of this trend extending to India is that SMEs received the highest number of phishing and virus-bearing emails. One in 661 emails was a phishing email for Indian SMEs and one in 248 emails carried a virus, while for larger Indian enterprises with 1,000-1,500 employees, one in 4,751 emails was a phishing email and one in 1,611 carried a virus," said report, which was released in Mumbai via mobile conference.

Targeted attacks are growing rapidly among businesses with fewer than 250 employees, it said.

These targeted cyber espionage attacks are increasingly hitting small businesses, which are the target of 31 percent of these attacks across the world. SMEs are attractive targets themselves and a stepping stone to ultimately reaching larger companies.

"This year's ISTR shows a clear focus among cyber-criminals at targeting individuals, systems and organizations where the highest profits can be made," said Anand Naik, Managing Director-Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec.

"India continues to rank high in the list for even the most basic threats, pointing to an urgent need for improved awareness levels and security measures, even as the country’s adoption of Internet and mobile technologies is on the rise," he added.

Attackers hone in on Indian SMEs, that may often lack adequate security practices and infrastructure. Additionally, small businesses and organizations can become pawns in more sophisticated attacks. Driven by attack tool-kits, in 2012 the number of global web-based attacks increased by one third and many of these attacks originated from the compromised websites of SMEs.

Report also revealed that India has seen a 280 percent increase in bot infections that is continuing to spread to a larger number of emerging cities in India.

With the prevalence of such infections, it is not surprising that the country accounts for nearly 15 percent of global bot-net spam, responsible for disseminating an estimated 280 million spam messages per day worldwide. In addition the report highlights a 42 percent surge during 2012 in global targeted attacks, as compared to the prior year.