Cyber attacks rising by 15%

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

“As per a report prepared 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 in Hyderabad on Thursday.

A survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the CERT-In shows that 57 per cent of the organizations providing one or another type of services 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.

Rai said the number of phishing cases, too, are on the rise among the Indian banks. About 7-8 cases of phishing are being reported on an average every day. And, most of these cases are source of financial cyber frauds, he added.

“Improving our cyber security postures requires a strategy involving people, process and technology. We need to deploy and incorporate new cyber security products and practices. We are training our people both within the country as well as seeking cooperation from countries like the US to train our manpower in implementing security in IT infrastructure,” he said.