Over 1.6 mn cyber attacks blocked on Indian insurance firms a day in Jan

New Delhi: Over 1.6 million cyber attacks were blocked on Indian insurance companies every day in January, a report showed on Monday.

A total of 49,844,877 cyber-attacks were recorded on 114 insurance sector websites.

On average, insurance sector applications face 430,000 attacks each, which is close to the overall average of 450,000 attacks per app across all industries, according to the report by Indusface, an application security SaaS Company funded by TCGF II (Tata Capital).

The report also discovered that 51 per cent of the Indian insurance websites were attacked with DDoS requests which is much higher than the overall average of 30 per cent sites being attacked by DDoS requests.

Apart from the DDoS request attacks, the other key concern for the insurance sector in India is the rise of Bot attacks.

Over 6 million such bot attacks were documented in January.

“The rise of bot attacks on the insurance industry is concerning as these tend to be more sophisticated and surgical. The potential risks that Indian insurers face range from unauthorised access to financial data and other sensitive information, or even the internal systems of the insurance company itself,” said Ashish Tandon, Founder and CEO, Indusface.

The bot attacks mounted by hackers are of three major types — account takeover, card cracking and scraping.

Hackers usually use bot attacks to take over financial accounts and conduct credit card fraud via cracking and scraping.

Apart from the large volumes of sensitive and lucrative information such as credit card details, banking information and personal data of customers, the other key factor driving attacks on Indian insurance companies is the rise of vulnerabilities.

“Most of the insurance companies are on the path to digital transformation in order to cater to digitally savvy consumers. This has increased the number of applications, and the attack surface as well,” said the report.

“It is time to adopt a holistic solution like the AppTrana WAAP, that bundles VAPT, WAF, API Security, DDoS & Bot Mitigation and secure CDN in one platform,” said Tandon.