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Indian enterprises were flooded with a whopping 14.6 crore malware threats in 2019 - a growth of 48 per cent (year-on-year) compared to 2018, a new report said on Friday.

Manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), education, healthcare, IT/ITES, and the government were the most at-risk industries in the country, said the report from Seqrite, the enterprise arm of Pune-based IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies.

Interestingly, almost a quarter (23 per cent) of the threats were identified through 'Signatureless behaviour-based' detection by Seqrite, indicating how a growing number of cybercriminals were deploying new or previously unknown threat vectors to compromise enterprise security.

"With the latest Seqrite annual threat report, we want to empower CIOs, CISOs, business leaders and all key public stakeholders with the insights they need to combat the growing complexity of the threat landscape," said Sanjay Katkar, Joint Managing Director and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies.

The most prominent trend was the drastic increase in the volume, intensity, and sophistication of cyber-attack campaigns targeting Indian enterprises in 2019.

The rapid integration of IoT devices, BYOD (bring your own device), and third-party APIs into enterprise networks has created newer security vulnerabilities that might go unnoticed until a major breach occurs.

Threat researchers at Seqrite observed several large-scale advanced persistent threats (APT) attacks deployed against organisations in the government sector.

"The entry of nation-states and organised cybercrime cells into the fray is expected to add more complication to this situation and will require Indian government bodies and corporate enterprises to shore up their cyber defence strategies in 2020 and beyond," the report noted.

More alarming, however, was the continued lack of security awareness amongst enterprises and government organisations.

"Unsecured Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols continued to be targeted through brute-force attacks," said the report.

Spear phishing attack campaigns leveraging Office exploits and infected macros were also used extensively by cybercriminals to gain access to enterprise networks and steal critical data.

"India's digital journey depends on ensuring robust cybersecurity for all stakeholders within the enterprise ecosystem," said Katkar.

The sharp spike should be a cause of concern for CIOs and CISOs in the country, especially given the growing digital penetration within their enterprise networks.

"With network vulnerabilities and potential entry points increasing at a rapid pace, threat actors are expected to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to power their malware campaigns in the future to capitalise on newer attack vectors," the report added.

Facebook on Monday launched a new consumer marketing campaign in India titled 'More Together'. India is the first country in the Asia Pacific region where such a campaign is being rolled out.

It is also the first time that Facebook is rolling out a 'high decibel campaign of this stature in India', the company said in a statement.

It is also the first time that Facebook is rolling out a 'high decibel campaign of this stature in India', the company said in a statement.

"India is at the heart of Facebook and one of our focus areas this year is to tell the exciting story of a service that is deeply embedded in the fabric of India," said Ajit Mohan, Vice President and Managing Director, Facebook India.

The campaign would have multiple campaigns over the next few weeks in eight languages and the one will be set in the context of Holi.

Facebook in 2019 introduced a new company logo to further distinguish the company from the Facebook app.

The company recently announced the appointment of Avinash Pant as the Marketing Director for India operations, to drive the consumer marketing efforts across the family of apps.

Twitter has joined efforts to do away with racially loaded terms such as master, slave and blacklist from its coding language in the wake of the death of African-American George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.

The project started even before the current movement for racial justice escalated following the death of 46-year-old George Floyd in police custody in May.

The use of terms such as "master" and "slave" in programming language originated decades ago. While "master" is used to refer to the primary version of a code, "slave" refers to the replicas. Similarly, the term "Blacklist" is used to refer to items which are meant to be automatically denied.

The efforts to change these terms in favour of more inclusive language at Twitter were initiated by Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver and the microblogging platform is now backing their efforts.

"Inclusive language plays a critical role in fostering an environment where everyone belongs. At Twitter, the language we have been using in our code does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we serve. We want to change that. #WordsMatter," Twitter's engineering team said in a post on Thursday.

As per the recommendations from the team, the term "whitelist" could be replaced by "allowlist" and "blacklist" by "denylist".

Similarly, "master/slave" could be replaced by "leader/follower", "primary/replica" or "primary/standby".

Twitter, however, is not the first to start a project to bring inclusivity in programming language.

According to a report in CNET, the team behind the Drupal online publishing software started using "primary/replica" in place of "master/slave" as early as in 2014.

The use of the terms "master/slave" was also dropped by developers of the Python programming language in 2018.

Now similar efforts are underway at Microsoft's Github and LinkedIn divisions as well, said the report.