India Remains Soft Target for Online Threats

According to a survey conducted by Symantec, India scored the top position on the chart for worms and viruses attacks that prevailed in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region in 2008.

India was among top three nations affected by spiteful activities. Spam and phishing attacks continue to bother the country, with 12% of the entire region's spam originating here only.

As per the report, 61% of India's Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) don't know about IT security threats, and 68% do not regard data loss as a major security issue. Further, 67% of the businesses care about data loss at the time of disaster, and 59% of senior employees who had lost or quit a job last year, had retained corporate information even after resigning.

Moreover, during 2008, India recorded an average of 836 bots each day. There were 1,03,812 different bot-infected PCs, thereby indicating an astounding increase of around 250% from 2007. Mumbai ranked top with 37%, Chennai followed at 24%, and Delhi at 7%. IPR and business information leak accounted for 32% and 68% of data loss in India respectively.

Meanwhile, Ken Schneider, CTO, Symantec security and compliance, stated that Internet security of businesses in India is really a matter of deep concern in wake of lack of IT policies, unprotected infrastructure, inadequately managed systems, and poorly safeguarded information. India will continue to remain a soft target of Internet threats, if enterprises will not enhance security policies and measures to defy malicious attacks, as reported by The Economic Times on September 19, 2009.

Besides, Symantec said that as a large number of people have started browsing the Internet, and as social networking is also becoming common, cybercrime generates huge profits, much higher than drug trafficking. David Freer, Vice-President for Symantec consumer business unit for Asia-Pacific, told IANS that cybercrime has outshined drug trafficking in terms of profit-making to such an extent that every three seconds, an identity theft takes place in the world, as reported by Sindh Today on October 4, 2009.

Earlier, in April 2009 as well, Symantec Corp. notified that there was a continuous increase in malicious code activity throughout 2008, primarily eyeing confidential information of netizens. The report also noted that Web surfing continued to remain the main source of new Web infections in 2008.

Related article: India Remains an Easy Target for Hackers in '06

» SPAMfighter News - 10/7/2009