India is among top three countries in Asia which experienced highest cost of DNS (domain name system) attacks in 2021 to date, as nearly 90 per cent of organisations globally experienced DNS attacks, with the average cost of each attack around US$950,000, a new report showed on Monday.

Asia recorded an increase of 15 per cent in average cost of a DNS attack, incurring a cost of US$908,140, up from US$792,840 the previous year.

Countries which saw significant increase in damages included Malaysia which increased by 78 per cent, the sharpest increase, as well as India which saw a significant increases of 32 per cent from past year, according to the report by EfficientIP, a leading provider of network security and automation solutions.

The report, conducted in collaboration with the IDC, showed that organisations across all industries suffered an average 7.6 attacks this past year amid the pandemic.

Around a quarter of companies have suffered a DNS attack abusing cloud misconfiguration, with almost half of companies (47 per cent) suffering cloud service downtime as a result of DNS attacks.

The threat report, now in its seventh year, also found a sharp rise in data theft via DNS, with 26 per cent of organisations reporting sensitive customer information stolen compared to 16 per cent in 2020’s Threat Report.

“As workers look to more permanently transition to off-premise sites, making use of cloud, IoT, edge and 5G, companies and telecom providers should look to DNS for a proactive security strategy,” said VP of Strategy for EfficientIP, Ronan David.

This year, phishing also continued to grow in popularity (49 per cent of companies experienced phishing attempts), as did malware-based attacks (38 per cent), and traditional DDoS attacks (29 per cent).

“While it is positive that companies want to use DNS to protect their increasingly remote workforces, organisations are continuing to suffer the costly impacts of DNS attacks,” said Research Manager European Security at IDC, Romain Fouchereau.