The Hindu Business Line : Data breaches, phishing hog the limelight

Coimbatore, Dec. 27 2007 not only witnessed heightened level of phishing incidence and cyber frauds but more sophistication and organised commercialisation of such malware activity among present day attackers.

Security experts attribute the rise in the number of such attacks to the increase in Internet penetration particularly among users in the banking and financial services space. “Some Government sites have also not been spared,” the Country Manager of RSA Security, Mr Amuleek Bijral, said.

Expressing the need for the banking sector to proactively handle such issues, he said: “Internet banking transactions are closely correlated to Internet penetration in India. Though the penetration is still relatively low, banks are confident of achieving a year-on-year growth of 50 to 60 per cent in Internet banking transactions very soon.”

“As more and more systems get hooked to the network, data protection and security becomes vital, underscoring the need for strengthening access and authentication control systems (within the organisation),” Mr Bijral said.

A quick look at some of the Internet security trends revealed that data breaches, spam, phishing, bots and Web plug-in vulnerabilities among others hogged the limelight in 2007.

Holes in programmes

Sharing such security-related information with Business Line, Mr Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Symantec India, said high profile data breaches accentuated data loss breaches. “Theft or loss of computer or other data storage medium accounted for 46 per cent of all data breaches during the first half of 2007. The education sector recorded the maximum loss of up to 30 per cent up to June this year, while the health sector accounted for 15 per cent of data breaches,” he said.

According to him, attackers found holes in Microsoft Vista when it made its debut early this year. “Microsoft released about 16 security patches of which 3 were specific to Windows Vista, but Vista did not provide any protection against a range of emerging threats.”

Spam incidence

Spam reached record levels in 2007. While the incidence of image spam declined, PDF spam emerged as a new annoyance. Image spam peaked to about 40 per cent of all spam in March, but started to decline thereafter. Symantec has estimated the PDF spam to account for about 20 per cent of all spam.