Even as Internet population in India has crossed 100 million, cyber crimes are on the rise. There are many kinds of cyber crimes – Phishing attacks, Identity Theft, Website hacking, creating Trojans / viruses (among others) all amount to cyber crimes. The reasons for cyber-crimes are vary as well. Some do it out of hate, some out of greed while some do it just for kicks! At same time some cyber attacks (if it can be called so..) are for constructive security feedback as well!
One of the main targets of attacks world over are government websites – They not only provide big coverage to attacker, but also provide with very sensitive & secretive government data. Govt. of India today published the number of cyber attacks it witnessed over last 3 years. Here are the details:
As per numbers released by National Crime Records Bureau, Cyber Crime cases registered under IT Act more than doubled, from 420 to 966 between year 2009 and 2010.
We have covered about three instances where high-profile government websites were hacked and defaced. However, the actual number of Government Websites that were hacked are quite huge.
A total number of 90, 119, 252 and 219 Government websites tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) were hacked / defaced by various hacker groups in the year 2008, 2009, 2010 and Jan–Oct 2011 respectively.
Again, this is growing trend and I am surprised that authorities have not taken stern actions to curb the growth of these cyber-crimes.