In the first half of the year 2013, the government of India has already been a victim of as many as 78 hack attacks as those many websites belonging to the authority were hacked till June this year. And that’s not all, Milind Deora, the Minister of State for Communications & IT has also revealed that 16,035 incidents pertaining to spamming, system break-in, malware infestations and more have been reported as well.
These findings were tracked by Indian Computer Response Team or CERT-In and this body has revealed the figures for the years 2011 and 2012 too. 308 and 371 websites were hacked in each of these years respectively. The aforementioned figure for security issues includes government portals as well as those belonging to the Defence department and public sector.
The minister revealed that in the year 2011, the security breaches stood at 13,301, while in the year 2012 they had increased to a great extent to hit the 22,060 mark. It should be noted that the figures mentioned for 2013 are only for the first two quarters and they are likely to increase by at least two folds by the end of this year.
These attacks have been carried out from different parts of the world and people behind them have taken resort to masquerading techniques and hidden servers. Thus, the origin of these cyber crimes and the identities of those involved have stayed hidden all this while. Nevertheless, the National Cyber Security Policy 2013 has been formulated to curb cyberattacks down and it is likely to help the government with the task of protecting sensitive information.
This information was provided by Milind Deora as a written reply to Lok Sabha, says a report by PTI on Times of India.