Watchdog detects 39,730 cyber attack cases this year: Prasad

Indian cyber security watchdog CERT-In has detected rise in cyber attacks and tracked 39,730 incidents till October this year in the country, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad informed Lok Sabha today.
"As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total no. Of 44,679, 49,455 and 39,730 cyber security incidents were observed during the year 2014, 2015 and 2016 (till October) respectively," Prasad said.
He said that the nature of cyber security incidents include phishing, scanning and probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus and malicious code, Denial of Service attacks, etc and over a period, the nature and pattern of incidents have become more sophisticated and complex.

"As per current trends, the cyber attacks observed on networks/systems in Indian cyber space are observed to be directed from cyber space of different countries including Pakistan," Prasad said.
In a reply to a separate question on cyber crimes, Minister of State for IT and Law PP Chaudhary said, "In order to detect variety of threats and imminent cyber attacks from outside the country, periodic scanning of cyber space is carried out."
Elaborating on cyber crimes, he said that as per the data maintained by NCRB, a total of 5,693, 9,622 and 11,592 cyber crime cases were registered during 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively

"Further, CBI has registered 11, 20 and 25 cases in the year 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively related to cyber crimes," Chaudhary said.

He said that government has taken various steps in the form of legal framework, emergency response, awareness, training, legal framework and implementation of best practices to prevent occurrences of cyber breaches and cyber crime threats.
"Government has initiated setting up of National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) to generate necessary situational awareness of existing and potential cyber security threats and enable timely information sharing for proactive, preventive and protective actions by individual entities," Chaudhary said.
He said that CERT-In is setting up a Botnet Cleaning and Malware Analysis centre for detection of computer systems infected by malware and to notify, enable cleaning and securing systems of end-users to prevent further malware infections.