According to Rajat Khare, Director, Appin, an IT security consulting company, India's corporate sector is facing losses by 8-10% of its overall revenue due to incidents of phishing and hacking, as reported by Financialexpress on March 30, 2008.

According to Rajat Khare, Director, Appin, an IT security consulting company, India's corporate sector is facing losses by 8-10% of its overall revenue due to incidents of phishing and hacking, as reported by Financialexpress on March 30, 2008.

The most common crimes on the Web are hacking, defacement of legitimate Websites, phishing and identity theft. Also, malicious e-mails are delivered to private e-mail addresses from the hacked ids. As a result of such illegal online practices, the number of incidents involving computer security has been constantly increasing.

In January 2008, there were 87 such reported incidents compared to 45 incidents in December 2007. Of these 47% were related to incidents of phishing, 25% to worms/viruses of the malicious program category, 21% to unauthorized scanning and 7% to technical help of other categories.

The security menace is enlarging not just because of outsiders who are infringing on the privacy of organizations online but also because of increasing competition among these entities. Recently, a software development company, based in Gurgaon, lodged a complaint charging one of its competing companies of allegedly stealing its application source code by attempting a computer hack.

Besides, as more and more Indian companies serve their clients over the Internet, it increases the possibility of their exposure to cyber crimes. According to statistics from CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team), a national government agency that locates sources of major security incidents on computers across the country, a total count of 152 Indian Websites URLs were disfigured during February 2008.

Also, during the past few months, the country saw hacking attacks on the Websites of its government bodies such as Indian Railways, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Department of Telecom, National Institute of Social Defense, Air Cargo Customs, National Institute of Health & Welfare, Forward Markets Commission, and BSNL among others.

Hackers have also defaced the Websites of Department of Information Technology, the primary body fighting the problem.

Hence, alarmed at the increasing number of hacking attacks on the government sites, the ministry of home affairs in India has advised for hosting the sites only on those servers that the central and state governments own.

---