SMEs more vulnerable to cyber attacks

NEW DELHI, INDIA: India's position in cyber crime is increasing at an alarming rate. According to Norton report, India has gained 5th position in cyber attacks due to excessive use of internet and internet devices for both work and play. The areas that have been affected by cyber attacks are social networks and mobile devices.

Initially, it was felt that cybercrime rate had lowered but closer look at the trend gave a different picture. The target attack by cybercrimes reached 42 percent.

In 2012, one threat which affected more than a million website was "LIZA". It is an SQL injected virus that spread scareware, encouraging users to install needless and rough anti-virus software.

Year 2013 will be taken over by a prominent threat called "RANSOMWARE", which constitute 11 percent of cybercrimes. Ransomware is a kind of malware which pop ups a window or an email which seems to be a warning from an official authority, though it is not the case, followed by identity theft and phising which constitute 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Another notable change was that a lot of SMEs have myth that they are not at risk to cyber attacks, that's not the truth.

Shantanu Ghosh, VP and MD, India Product Operation, Symantec, informed that SMEs are more vulnerable to cyber attacks due to the booming Internet. The target attacks have been up by 30 percent for the SMEs sector only, which itself is a surprising trend.

The other reason that attributes to such a mounting rate is the rise in the social media attack, especially, due to excessive use of smart phones and the emerging cities are prone to high cyber attacks. SMEs are expanding at a whooping rate in the tier 2 cities.

The financial and the social media sector are the two which has been widely exposed to the cyber attacks. Online attacks constitute 66 per cent which is an another astonishing rate. The major reason behind the success of cybercriminals are:

Sharing of information: Users do share a lot of information through various sources like social media, official emails and other means that enables criminals to scan useful information which further can be used to develop sophisticated spearphishing attacks.

Well funded: Criminals are able to develop highly sophisticated malware because they are well funded, often supported directly by organized criminal groups.

Adoption of technology: This segment plays crucial role in booming of cybercrimes in India. The growing number of devices and accessible points makes it difficult for an organization to defend against email threats.