According to recently available figures, incidents of cyber crimes have been escalating for the Indian government.
Lets look at the number of government websites that were hacked in India.
Year | Number |
2011 (till June) | 117 |
2010 | 252 |
2009 | 119 |
2008 | 90 |
This data is as per information from CERT-In.
CERT-In has Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) in place with similar vigilante agencies in other countries for mutual cooperation and exchange of cyber crime-related information, said Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology in written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha. Presumably, such understandings are expected to keep mischief-makers at their minimum best.
CERT-In is India’s computer emergency response team, and is the nodal agency in the country for responding to computer security incidents.
Stuff
Combing through the press releases of the agency, one comes across the latest post, dated March 2011. The release talks about (in exceptionally bad grammar for such a prestigious agency, if one might add) how the government has taken several steps to combat Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in July 2010. It targets Siemens industrial software and equipment running on Microsoft Windows. According to data released by Symantec in July 2010, Iran, Indonesia, and India, are among the top three countries to be hit by Stuxnet. India has 8.31 per cent computers infected with the worm (as opposed to 58.85 per cent for Iran and 18.22 per cent for Indonesia). US has a 1.56 per cent hits. Pakistan is the least affected in the list, with 1.28 per cent.