India Amongst High 3 Asian Nations Affected By DNS Cyber Assaults

India is among the top three countries in Asia that experienced the highest cost of DNS (domain name system) attacks in 2021 to date, as nearly 90 percent of organizations globally experienced DNS attacks, with the average cost of each attack around $950,000, a new report showed on Monday. Asia recorded an increase of 15 percent in the average cost of a DNS attack, incurring a cost of $908,140, up from $792,840 the previous year.

Countries that saw a significant increase in damages included Malaysia which increased by 78 percent, the sharpest increase, as well as India which saw a significant increase of 32 percent from last year, according to the report by EfficientIP, a leading provider of network security and automation solutions. The report, conducted in collaboration with the IDC, showed that organizations across all industries suffered an average of 7.6 attacks this past year amid the pandemic.

Around a quarter of companies have suffered a DNS attack abusing cloud misconfiguration, with almost half of companies (47 percent) suffering cloud service downtime as a result of DNS attacks. The threat report, now in its seventh year, also found a sharp rise in data theft via DNS, with 26 percent of organizations reporting sensitive customer information stolen compared to 16 percent in 2020's Threat Report.

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"As workers look to more permanently transition to off-premise sites, making use of cloud, IoT, edge and 5G, companies and telecom providers should look to DNS for a proactive security strategy," said Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP.

This year, phishing also continued to grow in popularity (49 percent of companies experienced phishing attempts), as did malware-based attacks (38 percent), and traditional DDoS attacks (29 percent). "While it is positive that companies want to use DNS to protect their increasingly remote workforces, organizations are continuing to suffer the costly impacts of DNS attacks," said Romain Fouchereau, Research Manager European Security at IDC. (IANS/JC)