New Delhi: India organizations paid at least Rs 6 crore ($784,000) per DNS attack in India as the country saw the highest number of such attacks at 12.13 per organization this year, a new report said on Tuesday.
Nearly 27 percent of companies in India had sensitive customer information stolen, compared to 16 percent globally. Cloud service downtime, as a result of attacks, reached 65 percent in the country.
The costs of attacks in India, however, decreased by 6.08 percent, from about $835,000 to $784,000 this year – slightly higher decrease in costs compared to the entire Asia region, which saw a decrease of 2.62 percent from $814,000 to $792,000, according to the ‘2020 Global DNS Threat Report’ by EfficientIP, a specialist in DNS security for service continuity, user protection, and data confidentiality, along with the International Data Corporation (IDC).
“In this era of key IT initiatives like IoT, Edge, SD-WAN, and 5G, DNS should play a much larger role in the security ecosystem,” said Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the need to shore up DNS defenses when any network or app downtime has major business implications,” David added.
Poor brand image is also of major concern as India surpassed the global average of 29 percent, with 44 percent of companies surveyed in India suffering brand damage due to DNS attacks.
A DNS attack is an exploit in which an attacker takes advantage of vulnerabilities in the domain name system (DNS). DNS is a protocol that translates a user-friendly domain name into a computer-friendly IP address.
“Recognition of DNS security criticality has increased to 77 percent as most organizations are now impacted by a DNS attack or vulnerability of some sort on a regular basis,” said Romain Fouchereau, Research Manager European Security at IDC.
“The consequences of such attacks can be very damaging financially, but also have a direct impact on the ability to conduct business. Ensuring DNS service availability and integrity must become a priority for any organization,” he added.
Globally, nearly four out of five organizations (79 percent) experienced DNS attacks, with the average cost of each attack hovering around $924,000.
The organizations across all industries suffered an average of 9.5 attacks this year.
“The figures illustrate the pivotal role of the DNS for network security, as threat actors make use of DNS’ dual capacity as either a threat vector or a direct objective,” said the report.
The report found that the number of businesses that suffered from cloud service downtime increased from 41 percent in 2019 to 50 percent in 2020, a sharp growth of nearly 22 percent.
According to the report, currently, 25 percent of companies perform no analytics on their DNS traffic (compared to 30 per cent last year).
SOURCE–IANS
