“2020 offered a perfect storm for cybercriminals and a critical tipping point for the cyber arms race,” SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner, said in a statement.

“The pandemic — along with remote work, a charged political climate, record prices of cryptocurrency, and threat actors weaponising cloud storage and tools — drove the effectiveness and volume of cyberattacks to new highs.”

“The overnight move to remote-working in reaction to pandemic exposed organisations’ vulnerabilities while security leaders had to cut down on their security spending in 2020 because of IT budget cuts. In 2021, this trend is reversing,” said Prateek Bhajanka, Senior Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.

“According to the logs analysed and made available to CERT-In, the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers from where the attacks appear to be originated belong to various countries, including Algeria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, USA, Vietnam etc,” he said

To enforce a ban, authorities would have to develop an intrusive surveillance system that could track all digital and internet activity in the country. Thankfully, India does not have the state capacity to pull that off. More likely, its efforts will only drive the cryptocurrency market underground.