According to a survey, 9,000 Indian websites have been hacked in the past five years and the latest being the railway website, the attack on which was claimed by 'Pak Cyber Pyrates'

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BANGALORE, INDIA: A recent India Risk Survey 2012, published by Pinkerton, a consulting firm, finds that the cyber crime rate in India has gone up by 50 per cent in the past one year and during the last five years, around 9,000 Indian websites, including various government departments, have been hacked.


Many government websites, some of them carrying sensitive information, have become victims of cross-border hacking, mainly from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and China.
 
As per figures published in the Computer Emergency Response Team - India (CERT In) monthly security bulletin for July 2012, as many as 2,414 websites were attacked.
 
Early August, 2012, an inactive website of the Southern Railways www.southernrailway.gov.was defaced and hackers, allegedly from Pakistan, calling themselves 'Pak Cyber Pyrates' replaced the home page of the website with a page with content that denounces India's role in Kashmir.

Since then, the official Southern Railways website moved to a new domain www.sr.indianrailways.gov.in back in 2010.

Experts caution that the above numbers point to how security measures have often failed organisations, leaving them vulnerable to cyber attacks.

The attacks are coming in various forms like Distributed Denial Of Service, phishing attacks or even military grade attacks. There are also several instances of hackers demanding hefty sums of money in exchange for a word of "guarantee" of not attacking further.

Sources in CERT say both Indian and Pakistani hacking groups are engaged in a cyber war of sorts with websites in both the countries being regularly attacked and defaced.  There are also as many number of attacks faced by Pakistani websites, the source adds quoting news reports.