Indian companies suffered highest domain name system attacks in 2020

Globally the DNS attack rate is 9.5 attacks per organisation.

According to the report, commissioned by Efficient IP, a network automation and security company, 27% of companies in India lost sensitive customer information in data breaches due to DNS attacks compared to 16% globally. This has tarnished the brand image of Indian companies more than their global counterparts. In India, 44% companies reported damage to their brand due to DNS attacks, compared to the global average of 29%.

India seems to have fared better than Asia peers in terms of cost of DNS attacks. Cost incurred by companies in Asia region fell 2.62% and stood at approximately ₹6 crore in 2020. The global average cost of each attack was around ₹7 crore.

In addition to losing data, in-house app downtime also remained extremely high in 2020. Application downtime, be it on premise or in the cloud were equally affected by DNS attacks. Around 82% of the companies had experienced application downtime of some sort.

“The consequences of such attacks can be very damaging financially, but also have a direct impact on the ability to conduct business. Ensuring DNS service availability and integrity must become a priority for any organization," Romain Fouchereau, Research Manager European Security at IDC said in a statement.

Even though DNS attacks remains a huge concern, companies are becoming more aware about the threat and its impact on business.

About 77% of Indian companies regarded DNS security as a critical component of their network architecture compared to 64% last year.

Further, 31% of companies are now adopting Zero Trust strategy compared to 17% last year, while 55% are using predictive analytics, up from 45% in previous year.

“DNS offers valuable information that can make security strategies against hackers much more proactive and preventative. The covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the need to shore up DNS defenses, when any network or app downtime has major business implications," Ronan David, VP of Strategy for EfficientIP said in a statement.

Researchers at IDC feel the increased adoption of cloud services due to covid-19 is likely to make cloud even more attractive target for attackers.

DNS is like a phonebook of the Internet which allows Internet devices to find specific web servers and access information hosted on them. It works by converting a hostname (such as www.example.com) into an IP address (such as 192.168.1.1) used to identify every Internet device. DNS can be targeted in multiple ways. DNS flood attack, DNS hijacking, DNS cache poisoning and DNS tunneling are some of them.