Heena Sharma Blog

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has cast a shadow on cyberspace as well. Subex, a Bengaluru-based firm that provides analytics to telecom service providers, said hackers are using the panic and confusion to trick employees and other stakeholders into downloading infected payloads or malware. In a situation where many employees work from home or access wi-fi networks that operate at enterprise-level security, devices such as routers can be hacked to plant a range of malware into handheld devices used by employees. “ Such devices could be turned into zombies or bots and added to botnets or used to launch attacks on systems and networks it connects once the employee is back in the office,” said Prayukth K V, chief marketing officer, Internet of things (IoT), Subex. Subex said this indicates a high level of adaptability as far as hackers are concerned. It said there were concerns that the outbreak could be used to breach networks and infrastructure components to either atta...

Net users in tier-II cities are most vulnerable to cyber security threats, with Patna being the most susceptible. A staggering 47 per cent of netizens surveyed from that city said they had been attacked. Patna was followed by Guwahati and Lucknow, according to a latest report by IT security solutions provider K7 Computing. The study says that almost three out of every ten Indian cyber users encountered one or more cyberattacks, while metro cities have experienced a similar number when compared to the previous quarter. Among the metros and tier-I cities, Delhi has seen the highest increase in terms of infection rate, with a growth of six per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis, says the K7 Computing's Cyber Threat Monitor report for the second quarter of 2019-20. The company uses infection rate, described as the regional percentage of threat events reported to its K7 Ecosystem Threat Intelligence (K7ETI) infrastructure, as a barometer to measure the exposure of netizens group...