India is a country with the second-largest number of account take-over logins – close to 1.38 lakh login's per hour in 2018, the Times of India reported. Citing a 2018 Akamai report – ‘Credential Stuffing: Attacks and Economies’, the report says India comes second only to the US as the preffered country of such cyber attacks.
An Account Take Over (ATO) occurs when a stolen login and password combination is used to access multiple accounts using bots. Remember those unsolicited SMS alerts you get saying “xxxxxx is your Facebook / Google recovery code”? That happens when someone is attempting to hack your login.
The United States saw more ATO’s that the combined total of the next nine countries – nearly 1.43 million ATO logins per hour!
The US was subject to most of the sources of ATO attacks as well, with the country developing the most number of credential stuffing. Credential stuffing has become commonplace since people use the same username and password for most of their accounts. India here, is the fifth largest source country for ATO logins.
According to the TOI report, most of such attacks targeted media organisations, gaming companies and the entertainment industry as these store valuable personal information, including credit card details.
(With inputs from The Times of India.)
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