Another alarming trend for Internet users in India is the threat landscape being heavily infested with worms and viruses. In the APJ region, India ranked first on worms and viruses attacks prevalence chart. nine of the top 10 malcodes found in India consisted of worms (55 percent) and viruses (15 percent) that disabled security related processes, downloaded additional threats and stole confidential information.

While the global averages for worms and virus attacks increased only marginally, India continued to rank high on these vectors of infection. A perfect case in point was the Downadup/Conficker worm, which left over thousands of computers in India infected during the initial stages of attack.  

“Enterprises with a lack of ‘defense in depth’ strategies are more likely to see worms and viruses infiltrate their environments and easily access their information and infrastructure,” said Dhupar. “It is time Indian enterprises adopt ingress and egress filtering on perimeter devices to prevent unwanted activity.”

Sixty five percent of worms and viruses in Indian enterprises are propagated through the File Sharing/Executables mechanism. This indicates that endpoint security and policy are still missing in many organizations as this level of security protection would have allowed IT administrators to scan removable drives for threats.  A large number of infections in India have also occurred due to filesharing programs, free downloads, and freeware and shareware versions of software.

Apart from the issue of worms and viruses, spam and phishing continued to plague India as well as the rest of the world.  Over the past year, Symantec observed a 192 percent increase in spam detected across the Internet as a whole, from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008. The report found that phishing continued to grow. In 2008, Symantec detected 55,389 phishing web site hosts, an increase of 66 percent over 2007, when Symantec detected 33,428 phishing hosts.

Twelve percent of spam detected in APJ in 2008 originated in India, making it the third-ranked country for this category. In 2007, India was the fifth-ranked APJ country, accounting for only 4 percent of spam in the region. It had the second highest number of spam zombies, with 17 percent of the regional total, and the fourth highest number of bots, with 5 percent of the total. The high ranking of India in these categories is the main reason for the high volume of spam originating there.