Cyber attacks in India have risen drastically and cybersecurity watchdog Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has tracked that around 39,730 cyber incidents have taken place this year till October.
The information was provided by IT and Law Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday (November 16) in the lower house of the parliament where he commented that over the period the nature and pattern of cybercrime have become more sophisticated and complex which include phishing, scanning and probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus and malicious code, Denial of Service attacks among others.
Though the CERT-In report suggests that there has been a decline in cyber security incidents from 2014 which had 44,679 incidents to 2016; the NCRB data reports an increase in registered cyber crime cases from 2013-5,693 cases to 2015-11, 592 cases.
"As per current trends, the cyber attacks observed on networks/systems in Indian cyberspace are observed to be directed from cyberspace of different countries including Pakistan," said, Prasad.
Junior Minister of IT and Law, P.P. Chaudhary said that in order to imminent the threats from other countries, “periodic scanning of cyberspace is carried out” adding that various other steps in the form of legal framework, emergency response, awareness, training, legal framework and implementation of best practices to prevent occurrences of cyber breaches are being carried out.
In order to implement the preventive steps, “the government has initiated the setting up of National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) to generate necessary situational awareness of existing and potential cyber security threats and enable timely information sharing for proactive, preventive and protective actions by individual entities. In addition, the CERT-In is also setting up a Botnet Cleaning and Malware Analysis centre for detection of malware infected systems and notify, clean and secure systems of end-users to prevent further infections.