Cyber attacks on e-wallets aim to steal data: Report

As traffic to e-wallet platforms grows, there has been a significant increase in cyber attacks on online payment gateways to steal data than to disrupt operations, a new report said on Wednesday.

According to the data provided by global leader in Content Delivery Network (CDN) services Akamai Technologies, hits to web pages on e-wallet companies grew from 512,115,015 per day in September to 1,264,470,283 per day in February in the country.

Akamai in India analysed the growth in traffic volume to India's e-wallet sites on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, three months before and three months after the demonetisation announcement.

"Nearly 94 per cent of attack attempts on mobile wallet companies were on the application layer (XSS and RFI attacks) with intent to steal business critical data," the report added.

Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks were insignificant in comparison to the overall number of attacks observed, the report noted.

DDoS attempts on these wallets constituted less than 1 per cent of the total number of attempts in this time period, emphasising the fact that attacks were intended to steal data and not necessarily disrupt operations of mobile wallet firms.

According to Akamai's recent "State of The Internet Security" report for Q4 2016, India is second in the list of countries in Asia Pacific that sourced the most web application attack traffic with nearly 86,38,666 attacks attributed as originating from the country, after China.

India also ranks fourth in the list of target countries for web application attacks globally, the report said.