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Our Bureau

New Delhi , June 23

THE reported incidents of Indian Web site defacement in popular domains like .com and .org shot up to at least 394 during May 2005 as compared to 70 cases tracked in the previous month.

According to the latest data of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), defacements in the .com domain accounted for the bulk of the total Web site defacements during the month. Against a mere 43 defacement cases recorded in this domain in April, the number of reported cases of cyber-graffiti rose to 313 in May. The defacement cases in .org domain were also up at 29 in May against just six cases in the previous month.

The month saw the highest number of cases since January 2005 when the total defacement had shot up to 798. With the latest statistics, the number of defacement cases reported by CERT-In between January and May stood at 1,547.

Web/ Web site defacement is a form of malicious hacking in which a Web site is "vandalised." The hacker replaces the site's normal content with a specific political or social message or will erase the content from the site entirely, relying on known security vulnerabilities for access to the site's content. This is done by taking advantage of new , exploitable security holes in the Web server technology — the software that stores and sends Web pages back to the Web browser.

As per the data, 20 defacements were tracked in the .net domain and 18 in the .in domain in May. Defacements of sites in other domains such as .co.in, .ac.in, .org.in, .gov.in, .info and .net.in accounted for the rest. No defacement was reported in the .biz and .edu domains.

CERT-In, which was constituted in January last year to tackle any possible hacking or virus attacks on information systems, including the country's vital networks such as power, railways, aviation and defence, provides reactive and proactive services to enhance cyber security. While it attempts to track .com Web sites, the actual incidents of defacement may be far more than that captured in the official statistics, as it is sometimes difficult to establish that a site in the `.com' domain is an Indian Web site, officials said.

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