9,174 Indian websites hacked till May: IT minister

Minister of Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad Monday said 9,174 Indian websites were hacked by various hacker groups from different parts of the world till May 2014.

"These incidents included phishing, scanning, spam, malicious code, website intrusions etc. These attacks have been observed to be orginating from the cyber space of a number of countries including USA, Europe, Brazil, Turkey, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria and UAE," he said in reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.

In addition to the hacking attempts, 62,189 security incidents were reported during the same period to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

"It has been observed that the attackers compromise computer systems located in different parts of the world and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual system from which the attacks are being launched," Prasad added.

The government has circulated Computer Security Policy and Guidelines to all the ministries and departments on taking steps to prevent, detect and mitigate cyber attacks.