India prime source, target country for web application attacks: Report

Bengaluru, May 17: India is at the second spot on the list of 'Global Web Application Attack Source Countries' in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region and 12th globally, a new report said on Wednesday, adding that the country is eighth when it comes to top target countries for such web application attacks.

According to the report by global leader in content delivery network services Akamai Technologies, the US is the top source country for web application attacks, showing significant year-over-year increase -- up 57 per cent from the first quarter last year.

The Netherlands, at second spot for the top source of web application attacks, dropped to 13 per cent from 17 per cent in the previous quarter, remaining a consistent source of attack traffic.

"Our analysis of first quarter tells us that risks to the internet and to targeted industry sectors remain and continue to evolve," Martin McKeay, senior security advocate and senior editor of the report said in a statement.

The report said that the first quarter of 2017 saw a 35 per cent year-over-year increase in total web application attacks as compared to the attacks that occurred in the first quarter of 2016.

The "First Quarter 2017 State of the Internet/Security Report" highlighted that Mirai "DNS Water Torture" bot attacks target the financial services industry.

"Use cases for botnets like Mirai have continued to advance and change, with attackers increasingly integrating Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerabilities into the fabric of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) botnets and malware," McKeay added.

Most of the impacted DNS servers received queries at an even rate during the attacks. The attacks can create denial of service outages by consuming the target domain's resources.

"Reflection attacks continued to comprise the largest number of DDoS attack vectors and accounted for 57 percent of all mitigated attacks in the first quarter of 2017, with Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) reflectors as the biggest source of attacks," the report said.

The top three attack vectors used against web applications were SQLi, LFI and XSS.