Advertisment

CERT-In for global effort on cyber attacks

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

NEW DELHI: CERT-In, the computer emergency response team under the department of IT and communications, has mooted the idea for an international collaboration to prevent cyber attacks.

Advertisment

Talking to CyberMedia News, Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-In said the international collaboration becomes necessary to track down cyber attackers targeting India. “We are already tied-up with other CERTs, but there needs to be a framework to integrate the related departments and ministries,” he opined.

"There is also a need for global information exchange in respect of BOTS, SPAM, DOS attacks and nature of cyber incidents between law enforcement agencies, various CERTs, service providers, domain owners, and domain registrars. We should also have reconciling of various legal regimes with technological capability. This will evolve standard procedures/manuals among countries mandating service providers for supply of information," added Rai.

Rai said attackers are refining their methods and consolidating assets to create global networks that support coordinated criminal activity. “The current threat environment is characterized by compound attacks simultaneously from different locations. There is a convergence of malware authors, phishers, spammers and bot-herders. There is also increased inter-operability between diverse threats - blended threats, apart from fake data about domain registrant on WHOIS directory,” he informed.

Advertisment

He said that the increase in cyber crimes were the result of decrease in cost computing power and communication connectivity. “The growing population of user-centric services, e-Commerce, e-Governance, On-demand services, Telecommuting and individualized entertainment have also made us vulnerable to cyber attacks,” Rai informed.

So far, 2007 has seen 490 phishing cases on financial institutions in India and abroad and defacement of 2,777 India Web sites, according to CERT-In statistics.

“There is also an increase in cases of fast-flux phishing and rock-phish. Botnets are evolving with increased number of Bots. The Command and Control (C&C) Servers controlling the Bots in India are located in USA, China, Germany, South Korea, and Spain. The command & control server regularly shifting,” he said further.

On the origin of cyber attacks, Rai said that the top attack originating countries were USA, China, Australia, Taiwan, and Russia. “Targeted attacks are on the rise. There is also an increase in data leakage and financial driven crimes. Spam constitutes 18 percent of email traffic from India. On an average source of about 58 percent spam e-mails toward India is from the US region,” he added.

tech-news