Indian Websites Being Defaced at a Tremendous Rate

As per CERT-In (Computer Emergency Response Team), an Indian government agency which controls and deals with computer security incidents in India, overall 1981 websites were mutilated in the first three months of the current year.

Details reveal that attackers wrecked and spoiled around 900 Indian sites in March 2010, highlighting the grave consequences of the threats to the cyber security emanating from neighboring countries. From these 901 defaced sites, 590 carried the domain name .in. The other defaced domain names were .net, .in, .com and .org.

Also, 510 sites were ruined in February 2010, out of which 346 reflected domain name -.in. Further, CERT-In informed that 570 websites were mutilated in January 2010.

Website mutilation is a sort of hacking. In this, the original home page is basically replaced by a system cracker which infiltrates into a web server, thereby changing the hosted site by fabricating its own site. Usually the attacker replaces the site's usual content with certain social or political message or deletes the content of the affected website.

KK Mookhey, Principal Consultant and Founder, Network Intelligence India, stated that this statistics just reflect the partial reality, because hacking nowadays is more than website defacement and data theft. Further, this figure does not also represent the total number of hacking incidents as many of them remains unreported, as per the news published by informationweek.com on April 12, 2010.

Notably, this data came in the midst of reports regarding Chinese hackers hitting sensitive Indian govt. sites. In the second week of April 2010, there were several reports claiming that China-based hackers have hacked confidential documents from the defense and diplomatic establishments of India.

For lessening the cyber crimes, A Raja, Telecom Minister of India, has asked for ideas that would help increase the security of online information and bolster cyber laws, as per the news reported by MID-DAY on April 12, 2010.

Finally, the attacks could be expected to surge at an even faster pace when past trends are considered. For instance, in the first quarter of 2009, just 384 sites were defaced while in 2010 it is 1981, a tremendous growth of 500%.

Related article: Indian Financial Industry Facing Rising Online Fraud

» SPAMfighter News - 4/22/2010