Enterprise - Security - 76 p.c. of emails from India were spam

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: Between January and June 2006, India accounted for just over one per cent of the spam originating in the global list of top 25 spam-producing countries. India is ranked 18th.

While this may seem comforting, what is alarming is that 76 per cent of all email messages originating in India during the period were considered spam. This trend was considerably higher than the 54 percent of Internet-wide traffic that was considered spam.

Prabhat Singh, who heads the Symantec global security response lab operations in Pune, “This is of concern because spam is the vector for fraudulent activity.”

This is just one of the few findings reported by security solutions company Symantec’s Internet security threat report. The company’s security response lab in India compiled this attack data based on attacks targeting an extensive sample of its customers. It plans to bring out these reports every six months. The next edition of the report will be made available in January next year.

The most common attack originating in India in the first six months of 2006 was the Generic SMTP “FROM:” Buffer Overflow Attack. This accounted for 26 percent of all attacks originating here.

The infamous honor for the country responsible for the most attacks targeting Indian computers is the United States. The country accounted for 68 per cent of all attacks targeting India and was also responsible for generating 51 per cent of worldwide spam. The US was the highest source country of Internet-wide attacks in the first half of 2006. It also had the second highest number of bot-infected computers during this period. Attackers often use these computers to launch attacks remotely. Since the US has an extensive and well-developed computer infrastructure, Symantec believes this provides more opportunities for malicious activity by attackers.

The United Kingdom was the country of origin for the second highest number of attacks against computers in India, accounting for 11 per cent of the total during this period. The report infers that some attack activity originating in the UK was targeting India-based computers specifically.

India low on bot

And now for some heartening news. In H1 2006, Symantec detected an average of 277 active bot-infected computers per day in India. This was considerably less than the worldwide average of 37,524, indicating that bot infection has failed to gain a strong foothold in India. Singh attributes this to the fact that the population of computers here is not as high as it is in the US.

Bot-infected computers pose threats to users and organizations alike. Operating in a coordinated fashion, bot-infected computers can be used to carry out denial of service (DoS) attacks, host spam email relays, and conduct network-based attacks designed to compromise computers.

Mumbai recorded the highest number of bot-infected computers of any city in India during this period, accounting for 38 per cent of the total. Delhi ranked second with 25 per cent and the IT hub Bangalore ranked third, accounting for 15 per cent of bot-infected computers in India.