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 the Rajya Sabha.

"As per the 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 the year 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (till October) respectively," Dhotre said.

Dhotre added 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 noticing the 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.

READ | From Malware distribution to IoT attacks, Top cybersecurity threats to watch out in 2020

Apart from these, malicious code attacks, attacks on servers, identify theft, spoofing and phishing attacks, denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks, attacks on critical infrastructures, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) 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 the agenda of Russia-based global cybersecurity solutions provider Kaspersky as industrial units in the country are expected to go in for greater automation and hence get exposed to bigger cyber threats that may disrupt the operations of critical infrastructure.

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

READ | India high on agenda of Russian cybersecurity solutions firm Kaspersky

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

(With agency inputs)