Government concerned over cyber security - 4,000 Indian websites hacked
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 26 December 2006, 18:30 IST
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New Delhi: Hacker groups defaced at least 340 Indian websites during November 2006, up from 244 sites targeted during last month – so much for the people showing concerns about cyber security. In all it was registered that the total number of Indian sites (government and non-government), that came under attack by hackers in the first nine months of the year, to over 4,000. Keeping a note of the increase in hacking incidents of government websites, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) instructed all central ministries and departments not to host their websites in the servers of private companies or in overseas servers. MHA has communicated to the various ministries and government departments, to host their sites only on the center and state government-owned servers. On the other hand it has not specified any time frame for the compliance. According to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) - Almost half of the websites targeted during November were in the .com domain (for commercial websites), while 172 reported incidents of defacement pertained to .com domain websites, 91 of them had the .in (country specific) domain, 43 found in .org (organization) domain, 12 present in .net (network) domain, 21 in the. info domain (for informative websites) and only one in the .edu (education) domain. The data does not give specific Indian websites that were defaced during the month. CERT-In, on the cyber intrusion data for November reported major computer security incidents in the Indian cyber community — mentioning 34 security incidents from various national and International agencies. The number of phishing incidents this month is reported to be 73 percent, showing an increase from last month. Phishing is an email fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. To the recipient, the email appears sourced from well-known and trustworthy websites. “During the month, about 24 percent unauthorized scanning incidents and 3 percent incidents related to virus/worm under the malicious code category were reported. As compared to last month, there is an increase in phishing incidents, with a decrease in scanning incidents,” reports CERT-In.

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