Cyber attacks rising 15% annually

The number of cyber attacks, including viruses, worms and frauds, is rising by over 15 per cent annually with many of them doubling, according to Gulshan Rai, director of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a nodal agency for the security and protection of critical infrastructure.

“As per a report by Symantec, on an average spam mails account for about 80 per cent of the total email traffic in the world. The situation is no different in India,” he said at the second day of the Internet Governance Forum 2008 here on Thursday.

A survey conducted by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) and CERT-In shows that 57 per cent of the organisations experienced compromised systems in 2007, a two-fold increase from the year 2000.

“Technology-oriented indicators clearly reflect that a monthly percentage of personal computers infected by a virus in the country has grown from about one per cent in 2001 to about 17 per cent in 2007. About 350 systems in a day get compromised and incorporated into Bots,” he said. Internet bots, also known as web robots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet.

Rai said the number of phishing cases too is on the rise among the Indian banks. About 8 cases of phishing are being reported on an average daily. And, most of these cases are source of financial cyber frauds, he added.