3.13 lakh cybersecurity incidents reported in India till October this year

India encountered over 3.13 lakh cybersecurity incidents till October this year, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha.

"As per information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 49,455, 50,362, 53,117, 2,08,456 and 3,13,649 cybersecurity incidents were reported during year 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (till October) respectively," Dhotre said.

Dhotre ded that service providers, intermediaries, data centres and body corporate are mandated to report cybersecurity incidents to CERT-In within a reasonable time of occurrence or ticing incident to have scope for timely action. 

Dhotre said security incidents that shall be mandatorily reported to CERT-In as early as possible to leave scope for action include targeted scanning/probing of critical networks/systems, compromise of critical systems/information, unauthorised access of IT systems/data, and defacement of website or intrusion into a website and unauthorised changes such as inserting malicious code, links to external websites etc.

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Apart from se, malicious code attacks, attacks on servers, identify ft, spoofing and phishing attacks, denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks, attacks on critical infrastructures, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCA) systems and wireless networks, and attacks on applications such as e-governance, e-commerce etc also need to be reported, he said.

India is high on nda of Russia-based global cybersecurity solutions provider Kaspersky as industrial units in country are expected to go in for greater automation and hence get exposed to bigger cyber threats that may disrupt operations of critical infrastructure.

According to a recent survey on state of industrial cybersecurity conducted by ARC visory Group and Kaspersky, nature of cyber attacks are changing from undirected attacks to targeted attacks that expose companies to loss of control' or manipulation of control'.

RE | India high on nda of Russian cybersecurity solutions firm Kaspersky

survey tes that ransomware attacks were cited as greatest concern followed by malware or viruses and vanced persistent threats (ATPs). One of world's largest privately-owned cybersecurity companies, Russia-based Kaspersky operates in over 200 countries and territories with 35 offices in 31 countries.

(With ncy inputs)