27% of industrial sector computers in India affected by malware in 2022: Report

New Delhi, March 28 (IANS) Nearly 27 per cent of industrial sector computers got affected by malware and other malicious software in India in 2022, a new report said on Tuesday.

According to the ICS threat landscape report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, the second half of 2022 was marked by a rising number of attacks carried out using malicious scripts, phishing pages (JS and HTML) and denylisted internet resources.

Malicious scripts and phishing pages (JS and HTML) were distributed both online and via email, while, a significant part of denylisted internet resources were used to distribute malicious scripts and phishing pages.

"Our team observed a steadily high rate of attacks on industrial sectors - without a typical drop-in attack during summer vacations or winter holidays period. However, the growing attack rates in industrial sectors, that are being conducted using social engineering, seem alarming," Kirill Kruglov, senior researcher at Kaspersky ICS CERT said.

The report said India has been highly affected by malicious scripts and phishing pages by 9.6 per cent and secondly by denylisted internet resources by 8.7 per cent when observing geographical regions.

While Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America got top regional rankings with most operational technology (OT) computers compromised using removable devices.

Serbia (7.5 per cent) was in the third place in country rankings affected by web miners, and Northern Europe became the only region that showed a growth in ransomware attacks and malware spread via email clients.

The report said that threat actors use malicious scripts for a broad range of tasks -- from collecting information, tracking activity, and redirecting browser requests to malicious web resources, to downloading various malicious programs or loading malware (spyware or tools for the covert cryptocurrency mining) in the user's browser.

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