New Delhi, Feb 15 (IANS): Indian websites and applications witnessed over 5.14 billion cyber attacks last year, especially targeting the healthcare sector, a new report revealed on Thursday.

With a 10 times increase in attacks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in India emerged as key targets for cybercriminals due to the high-value customer data they store, according to the report by Indusface, a TCGF II (Tata Capital) funded application security company.

The retail and e-commerce industries were mostly targets of carding attacks.

Other industries analysed, include IT services and consulting, manufacturing, telecommunications, marketing, and advertising.

"Along with card cracking or credential stuffing, we also saw bot-driven, low-rate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks being used more frequently,” said Ashish Tandon, CEO of Indusface.

Coming to mitigation he added, “We have seen reasonable success where AI models are alerting our managed services team of possible anomalies and the team is able to quickly take mitigation measures.”

Indusface’s 'AppTrana' network blocked 6.8 billion attacks globally, with 5.14 billion of those targeting Indian enterprises, SMEs and government organisations.

Cyberattacks exhibited an average quarterly spike of 63 per cent from Q1 to Q4 in 2023, underscoring the urgency for robust cybersecurity measures, said the report.

The report sheds light on the vulnerability of various industries, particularly the healthcare sector, where 100 per cent of websites faced bot attacks, and the banking, finance, and insurance sector, where 90 per cent entities experienced similar attacks.

In 2023, eight out of 10 sites faced targeted bot attacks, witnessing a 46 per cent increase each quarter, totalling over 467 million bot attacks.

Major cyber attack origins, apart from India, included the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, and Singapore, the report mentioned.