India No. 5 in web crime list

India has risen to the fifth spot in the world's cybercrime ranking for 2009 from the 11th spot in 2008 and now only lags behind the US, China, Brazil and Germany.
The report, compiled by Internet security products firm Symantec, shows that cyber criminals are now increasingly going for Web-ased attacks using social-networking sites compared to the earlier dependence on the e-mail route used to steal information about credit cards and bank accounts.
Symantec vice-president David Freer told MAIL TODAY that social-networking sites are becoming the target for cyber attackers because these involve a set of like-minded people who trust each other. "It is the cultural trust that cyber attackers find easy to exploit," he added.
Freer explained that when a file is opened on a social-networking site it can result in a malicious ware being downloaded on to a PC, which is then used by the cybercriminals to steal the required data.
He said that cyber-criminals have also turned their attention toward enterprises, given the potential for monetary gain from compromised corporate intellectual property.
"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," he added.
Freer said in 2009 India ranked second in Webbased attacks in the Asia Pacific region, which includes China, Australia, Japan and the ASEAN countries, with 16 per cent of the total attacks.
This is a significant rise from 2008 when India accounted for less than one per cent of Web-based attacks in the region.
Globally, in 2009, India ranked seventh with three per cent of the total webbased attacks worldwide.
According to the report, there has also been a surge of 'bot' or robotic software used for cyber attacks.
India saw an average of 788 bots per day in 2009. About 62,623 distinct bot-infected computers were observed in India during the period.
With 50 per cent, Mumbai had the highest number of bot-infected computers, followed by Delhi at 13 per cent and Hyderabad at seven per cent. "Throughout 2009, we saw botnetinfected computers being advertised in the underground economy for as little as three cents per computer," Freer pointed out.
It also turned out to be a turbulent year for spam. In 2009, spam made up 88 per cent of all e-mails observed by Symantec. Of the 107 billion spam messages distributed globally per day on average, as much as 85 per cent were from botnets.
The 10 major bot networks, including Cutwail, Rustock and Mega-D, now control at least five million computers.
As many as 71 per cent of the malicious codes were propagated through file-sharing, 35 per cent through file transfer and common Internet file system and 17 per cent through remotely exploitable vulnerability.