Cryptojacking emerged as top threat in July-December 2018: Quick Heal report

India faced a total of 50 million cyberthreats between July to December last year, translating to 186 detections per minute, a report from Seqrite, the enterprise arm of Indian cybersecurity firm Quick Heal Technologies, showed.

According to the report, these detections include threats such as cryptojacking, ransomware, trojans, exploits, worms, infectors, potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) and adware.

However, cryptojacking emerged as one of the most prominent threats during the period with more than 15,000 instances surfacing on a daily average totaling 2.76 million detections.

Ransomware, too, remained one of the persistent threats, the report said, adding that Seqrite detected 2,000 instances on a daily basis.

Ransomware attacks have also evolved with time to become more sophisticated and targeted, leveraging multiple attack vectors to sneak past enterprise defences, the report added.

GandCrab, for instance, has evolved five times since it was first detected in January 2018, demonstrating why ransomware remains the most worrisome threat for organisations. There was also a sharp increase in the number of fileless malware, the report stated.

In terms of sectors, IT/ITes was targeted the most with more than 27% detections followed by professional services, manufacturing and educational institutions with 24.43%, 17.70% and 11.08% detections, respectively.

Interestingly, the total number of detections in the fourth quarter (October to December) last year came down to 22.5 million against 26.6 million in Q3 (the July-September period).

Quick Heal serves close to 30,000 enterprise customers, mostly in the small and medium segment, and competes with security solutions providers such as McAfee, Kaspersky and Trend Micro. According to a report by research firm Gartner, enterprise spends on IT security services in India are expected to grow to $1.7 billion by the end of 2018, up 12.5% from 2017.

Quick Heal reported a 6% increase in consolidated revenues from operations to Rs 318.3 crore for the financial year ended March 2018.

It is lining up a major push into the enterprise market on the back of new products and services based on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), two top executives from the firm had told TechCircle in September last year.

The Pune-based company, which counts venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as an investor and which went public in 2016, will consolidate its enterprise solutions under the Seqrite brand that it had launched three years ago as part its new strategy. It previously offered enterprise solutions under the Quick Heal brand.

“The focus now is to consolidate our enterprise solutions under Seqrite and offer better products based on AI and cloud to add large enterprise customers,” joint managing director and technology chief Sanjay Katkar told TechCircle.