Mumbai Has Most Bot-Infected Systems in India

Security firm Symantec stated that India's financial hub, Mumbai, is being attacked by terror groups. Also, hackers are penetrating into the city.

The new Internet Security Report by Symantec informs that from 62,623 different bot-affected systems in India, 50% were in Mumbai. The report also says that the amount of active bots in Mumbai also surged by 13% from 2008.

Security experts explained that bots are the pieces of software which can initiate and execute automated attacks on networked systems, like denial-of-service attacks. Bots can also be employed for click fraud. Further, spambots are also quite common. Spambot is a sort of Internet bot that tries to spam huge amount of content on the Web, generally by inserting advertising links.

Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Symantec for SAARC region, stated that the reason for high botnet activity in Mumbai is that it is a city with the highest level of Internet and broadband penetration. Also, it is increasing at a fast pace. The value of data saved on those systems could be another reason, as per the news published by finance buzz on April 22, 2010.

Delhi is another city which is being discussed in the Symantec report. It accounts for India's 13% bot-infected systems. Hyderabad is the next city with 7% bot-infected computers. Bangalore (6%), Cochin (5%), Chennai (4%), Pune (3%) and Ahmedabad (2%) also contributed considerably in bot-infected systems.

This rising botnet activity takes India many steps forward on the cybercrime charts. The report also states that the ongoing trend of Indian web users is that the threat scenario is greatly loaded with viruses and worms. There are 51% worms in India, which is higher than the average 40% in the entire Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region. In India, out of total malicious codes 26% were viruses against 16% APJ average. Other important mal-codes prevalent in the country were trojans (13%) and Backdoors (3%).

In addition, 6% of the spam zombies worldwide and 28% of the spam zombies in APJ region are hosted by India. Moreover, the country accounts for 1% of the world's phishing hosts and 7% of the phishing hosts in APJ region.

Related article: Mumbai Police To Become Cyber Cops

» SPAMfighter News - 5/4/2010