How safe is Indias cyber space?

MUMBAI, INDIA: It’s more than three decades now, since India has been fighting against terrorists across its boarders and territories. While, the nation of a billion plus populations has been a major terror victim, now the landscape of terror has also spread to the cyber space. Many security experts observe that now India is also on the cyber criminals’ hit list.

According to Internet World Statistics report, India is fourth behind Japan, China and the US among the list of top 20 countries with highest Internet users. Though India's Internet penetration is mere 7 per cent against its huge population, the Internet user score has surged by 1,520 per cent between 2000 and 2009, which is about 4.7 per cent of global Internet users.

The report is an indication about how India's presence on the Web is on the rise with growing Internet users here and experts observe that the situation is attracting cyber criminals, who are smartly exploiting it.

Technology security firm McAfee Inc., which has the McAfee Labs spread across 30 locations world over, monitors all the activities of cyber criminals on the Internet round the clock across the year. It has over 350 malware researchers who constantly track about 50,000 malware pieces every day and identify it using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithm systems.

According to McAfee India's technical product manager Vinoo Thomas, today cyber criminals are looking at what people search on the Internet and then try to misuse those search keywords to develop malicious contents such as viruses, spams, phishing emails and botnets.

“Malware authors make use of breaking news or popular search terms to ensure a higher return on investment. Popular news searches such as Micheal Jackson's death, Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Bangalore blasts, Indian celebrities and cricketers are misused by malware writers,” Thomas points out.

He stresses that even legitimate websites are being compromised by malware developers and says, “It’s not always easy for users to identify which site is safe. Even experienced users can be deceived if a trusted site was compromised to serve malware.”

In recent past many high-profile Indian sites that have been compromised to serve malware include banks, security vendors, portals, businesses, educational and government sites. Phishers are carrying out attacks specific to Indian banks with the rise in e-commerce and m-commerce in the country. In fact, Visa and Master Cards are actively involved in security awareness campaigns for customers.

Moreover, malware are now localized using India-specific themes with auto-run worms via flash drives. Even though users restrict downloading and just surfs the web or search new items, there's high possibility of the machines getting infected. After that such machine starts to infect other machines by sending spam emails and malware up to 10 GB per day.

In fact, the highly notorious and infamous Conficker worm which already has infected millions of computers world over hasn’t spared Indian net users too. Already, a big number of net users from BSNL, MTNL, Airtel, Reliance, Tata and other service providers are its victims now. According to web reports, India’s spam and botnet contribution to the world last year increased from 4 per cent in Q1 to 7 per cent in Q2.

Thomas views that the risks on web are constantly changing and a site that is safe one day, can be risky the next day.

“Cyber criminals are getting smarter and try to exploit users’ vulnerabilities. They exploit the software patches in the form of .pdf files rather then .exe files which can be easily tracked at the gateway level by security programs,” he concludes.

And the issue raises that perennial question once again - is India a potential target of cyber terrorism?

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