Even among growing concern over cyber security, hacker groups defaced at least 340 Indian websites during November 2006, up from 244 sites targeted during last month. This takes the total number of Indian sites (government and non-government), that were under attack by hackers in the first three quarters of the year, to over 4,000.
Almost half of the websites under attack during November were in the .com domain (for commercial websites), according to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). While 172 reported incidents of defacement pertained to .com domain websites, 91 belonged to the .in (country specific) domain, 43 in .org (organization) domain, 12 in .net (network) domain, 21 in .info domain (for informative websites) and only one in the .edu (education) domain. Nevertheless, the data does not reveal the particular Indian websites which were defaced during the month.
On the cyber intrusion trends for November, CERT-In, which tracks major computer security incidents in the Indian cyber community - said 34 security incidents were reported to the team from various national and International agencies.
A large number of phishing incidents were reported in this month (73%). Phishing is an email fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. To the recipient, the email appears to come from well known and trustworthy websites.
"During the month, about 24% unauthorized scanning incidents and 3% incidents related to virus/worm under the malicious code category were reported. As compared to last month, phishing incidents have increased and scanning incidents have decreased," CERT-In said.
It may be recalled that taking note of the growing number of hacking incidents of government websites, the ministry of home affairs (MHA) earlier this year, instructed all central ministries and departments not to host their websites in the servers of private companies or in overseas servers. This was done as a number of government sites hosted in the web servers of private firms or those hosted in servers located outside India were targets of different hacker groups.
The MHA, in its communication to the ministries and government departments, has said they should host their sites only on the Centre and state government-owned servers, but did not specify a time-frame for adherence.
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