Financial firms are attractive targets for cybercriminals, as they hold vast amounts of customers’ valuable financial and personal data. Cyber attacks are growing rapidly, a report showed today that Over 1.6 million cyber attacks were blocked on Indian insurance companies every day in January.
A total of 49,844,877 cyber attacks were recorded on 114 insurance sector websites. Seeing the attack attempts, financial institutions must prioritize security to protect themselves and their customers from the growing threat of cyber attacks.
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 percent of the Indian insurance websites were attacked with DDoS requests which is much higher than the overall average of 30 percent of 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 concerns 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, of 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 customers’ personal data, the other key factor driving attacks on Indian insurance companies is the rise of vulnerabilities.
Many insurance companies are indeed embracing digital transformation. This trend has been fueled by several factors, including changing customer expectations, technological advances, and increasing industry competition. By adopting new technologies and digital channels, insurers can differentiate themselves from competitors and gain a competitive advantage.
With the growing use of digital technologies and the increasing amount of data being generated and stored by insurance companies, the risk of cyber attacks has also increased.
