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Even as the number of attacks on Indian cyber space have increased in the past five years, security experts have detected that a significant number of them are being carried out from China.
According to a report prepared by the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) along with Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (ISAC), the number of Indian Web sites that have been hacked has gone up from 5,211 in 2006 to 17,306 in 2011.
The recent ‘Travent’ attack, for example, is now believed to have been carried out from China. In this attack, phishing mails were sent to individuals, with documents as attachments. These documents exploited previously known vulnerabilities to drop the ‘Travnet’ malware into the system. Once Travnet infects a machine, it searches for all document files, such as pdf, ppt and doc and uploads this data to remote servers. Rajshekhar Murthy – Director, CERT-ISAC, said, “It’s interesting to note that the domain was recently registered, is locked and expires in 2014. Guangdong province from China seems to pop up everywhere.”
Same server
According to the report, 21 domains were being hosted on the same server (WHOIS server, domaincontrol.com) and all of them were active.
With Independence Day round the corner, the number of attacks from the neighbouring countries could increase, experts say. According to a report by Symantec, 42 million cyber crimes happen in India every year. However, experts say that India has adequate steps in place for such attacks. “We have the IT Act, Cyber law and now with Cyber Security Policy in place, steps will be taken up for dealing with such issues,” M.S. Vijayragahavan, advisor to the National Technical Research Organisation said. The number of security attacks thwarted by Indian agencies has increased from 552 in 2006 to 13,301 in 2011
The Government is investing Rs 300 crore on cyber security initiatives including building an army of cyber warriors.
To start with, four pilot projects have been identified, including setting up of a testing lab, conducting a test audit, study of vulnerabilities and establishment of a multi-disciplinary centre of excellence.
> ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in
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