India ranks 5th in the Cyber attack

In a recently released report by Symantec, India ranks among top 5 countries globally for cyber attacks. India was ranked 11th in 2008 and has risen to 5th position in 2009. The other countries are Russia, China, US and Brazil. Also India ranks 2nd in the Asia Pacific countries for cyber crimes. Cyber attacks from India accounts for 16 percent in total cyber crimes in Asia Pacific countries in 2009, up from less than 1 percent in 2008.

Also the medium of cyber crime has also changed in 2009 than from 2008. In 2009, most of the cyber attacks were through social networking sites where as in 2008, it was mainly through emails. It is reported that on social networking site, personal information is easily available and users trust each other much more. In these cases it becomes easy to send malicious content which the targets users easily clicks. Once clicked, the suspicious files get stored into local system and than information stored can be easily collected.


On changing focus in cyber crimes, Symantec vice-president David Freer said, "The report found that attackers are leveraging the abundance of personal information openly available on social-networking sites to synthesise socially engineered attacks on key individuals within targeted companies."

The Symantec report also highlighted that "bot" or "robot software" are being increasing becoming preferences in cyber attacks.

Among Indian cities, it is reported that Mumbai has maximum no. of computers impacted form bots accounting for 50 percent of computers infected with bots, followed by Delhi  13 percent and Hyderabad 7 percent.