India among Top 5 Countries to be Attacked by Ransomware - Kaspersky Lab

Ransomware attacks across the world and among the top 5 is India Ransomware forces its victims to pay a ransom through certain online payment methods in order to grant access to their systems, or to get their data back.

"Ransomware attacks are high in India and it is one the top five countries that has most infections," Vitaly Kamluk, Head of APAC Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab, said.

According to statistics presented by Kamluk during a round table discussion on "Security Threat landscape" here on Friday, India takes the first spot in the list of countries that were attacked by Teslacrypt ransomware in March-May 2016 and ranked fourth in the countries that was attacked by Locky ransomware during the same period.

Locky is a Windows ransomware infection that was released in the middle of February 2016. This ransomware infection affects all versions of Windows.

While explaining the data received by Kaspersky Labs, Kamluk said Karnataka (36.58 per cent) was the most affected state with ransomware with Tamil Nadu (16.72 per cent) taking the next spot.

Next came Maharashtra (10.86 percent), followed by Delhi (10.00 percent), West Bengal (6.70 percent), Uttar Pradesh (5.33 percent), Telangana (4.54 percent), Kerala (3.87 percent), Gujarat (2.35 percent) and Haryana (1.96 percent) at the last spot.

While talking about the global trends, Kamluk said there are mainly five categories of ransomware that are trotting on the internet today. These include encryption ransomware, master boot record (MBR) ransomware, screen locker, ransomware encrypting web servers and mobile device ransomware, which is majorly affecting Android devices.

"Popular propagation methods of the infection include infected websites, malvertising (malicious advertising), transfer of affected file via e-mail - such as documents or multimedia files or instant message and social networks," he noted.

He said governments and antivirus service companies should work together to check the cyber attacks.

"CoinVault decryptor was built by Kaspersky Lab and the Netherlands' National High Tech Crime Unit to counter such attacks," he noted.

Kemluk said, "Antivirus software is kind of a personal advisor. Unless you have a very technical friend to reverse engineer the threat, you will need these softwares to do that work for you. Antivirus softwares are going to stay because developers will be developing new softwares over time."

Kaspersky is now rolling out 360-degree security solutions for enterprises, Altaf Halde, Managing Director (South Asia) Kaspersky Lab, India said.

"We have started offering very focussed services to the enterprises, such as solutions for data centres, light agent solution for virtualised environment that does not degrade its speed and performance and solutions for industrial security," Halde noted.