India Witnessed 18 Mn Cyberattacks A Day In Q1 2022: Google

India saw 18 Mn cyberattacks and 2 Lakh threats per day in the first quarter of 2022, Google’s vice president of engineering for privacy, safety and security Royal Hansen reportedly said while addressing the ‘Safer With Google’ event on Thursday (August 25).

“In a way it has gotten to a level of activity where it is not a question of if someone will be attacked, but how they will be prepared,” Moneycontrol quoted Hansen as saying. 

Touting India as its ‘launchpad’, Hansen said that Google has introduced several products and features in India before rolling them out in the rest of the world. 

He added that the company would continue to do this in the context of cybersecurity, privacy and safety as India is a ‘great example of a growing thriving dynamic online ecosystem’, the report said.

The second edition of the event, which was held in New Delhi, was attended by government officials, Digital India Corporation MD Abhishek Singh, Google India’s country head Sanjay Gupta, Google Asia-Pacific’s head of trust and safety Saikat Mitra, among others. 

Terming cybersecurity as one of the major issues for the world, the tech giant launched a host of pan-India initiatives and programmes at the event to bolster online safety and combat online fraud.

“As local threat vectors evolve, our focus is on strengthening our defences against these, through safety enhancements in our products, adapting our policies to prevent misuse of our platforms, and identifying and weeding out threats at the root cause,” said Mitra. 

Google India’s vice-president of marketing Sapna Chadha also said that the company would raise more awareness to make the internet ‘more inclusive of women, senior citizens, language users, and LGBTQIA+ communities’.

As part of this, Google announced a grant of $2 Mn for non-profit organisations to strengthen support channels and expand digital safety skilling of vulnerable communities. The grant will also enable organisations to create content in regional languages and pilot new outreach channels.

Besides, Google will also flagoff multi-city cyberskilling roadshow to upskill approximately 1 Lakh developers and founders to build safer apps and embed security tools at all stages of development.

Hansen was also quoted as saying that the company enrolled 150 million accounts for two-step verification or multi-factor authentication in 2021.

Apart from this, Google will also collaborate with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Digital India, and a slew of banks and telecom companies to raise awareness among users against digital fraud. 

The tech giant also launched a website in three languages – Bengali, Hindi and Tamil – to protect children from sexual abuse online. 

India is one of the largest markets for Google. The tech giant accounted for 94% of the searches emanating from India as of July 2022, while YouTube had a user base of nearly 459.23 Mn users in India last year.