India sees a spike in spam mails

India witnessed a spike in spam mails among Japan, China and Asia Pacific countries in six months ended this May, said a new report by Cisco Systems Inc. on Wednesday.

The country saw an 85% increase in spam mails between December 2014 and May 2015, as compared with China, where it went down by 32% and Vietnam, which saw 24% decrease, according to data collated by the company. South Korea, too, saw a decline in spam volumes.

In absolute numbers, the number of spam mails in India grew to 5.4 billion mails per day in the six-month period from 2.92 billion spam mails a day.

While Japan saw the number of such mails going up to 4.74 billion from 1.98 billion, in Taiwan, the number was up to 4.73 billion from 2.91 billion spam mails a day.

“As adversaries develop more sophisticated methods of breaching network defences, spam and phishing emails continue to play a major role in these attacks,” the report said. “The volume of worldwide spam has remained relatively consistent, but APJC (Asia Pacific, Japan and China) exhibited tendencies towards increased spam volumes.”

“With the digitization of business and the IoE (Internet of Everything), malware and threats become even more pervasive,” it said. “The innovation race between adversaries and security vendors is accelerating, placing end users and organizations at increasing risk. Vendors must be vigilant in developing integrated security solutions that help organizations be proactive and align the right people, processes, and technology.”

Cyber threats that grew in prominence included Adobe Flash vulnerabilities, which saw a 66% increase in the first half of 2015, new variants of ransomware as they matured to the point that they can be completely automated and carried out through the dark web and Dridex, quickly mutating campaigns that have a sophisticated understanding of evading security measures and let attackers change the emails’ content and attachments among other things.

The report also highlighted that global cyber governance is not prepared to handle the emerging threat landscape or geopolitical challenges and a collaborative, multi-stakeholder cyber governance framework is required to sustain business innovation and economic growth on a global stage.

“Hackers, being unencumbered, have the upper hand in agility, innovation and brazenness. We see this time and again, whether it is nation state actors, malware, exploit kits or ransomware. A purely preventive approach has proven ineffective, and we are simply too far down the road to accept a time to detection measured in hundreds of days,” said Jason Brvenik, principal engineer, Security Business Group, Cisco.

“The question of ‘what do you do when you are compromised’ highlights the need for organizations to invest in integrated technologies that work in concert to reduce time to detection and remediation to a matter of hours; and then they should demand their vendors help them to reduce this metric to minutes.”