Garvit Gangwar asked: How frequently India faces external cyber-attack? Which countries are prime sources of these attacks?

Munish Sharma replies: On March 16, 2018, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in a written reply to a question informed Rajya Sabha (Council of States):

“As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total no. of 44679, 49455, 50362 and 53081 cyber security incidents were observed during the year 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively.”

“The types of cyber security incidents include phishing, scanning/probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus/malicious code, Denial of Service attacks, etc. Over a period, the nature and pattern of incidents are becoming more sophisticated and complex.”

On March 07, 2018, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in a written reply informed Lok Sabha (House of the People):

“As per information reported to and tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) a total of 22,207 Indian websites including 114 Government websites were hacked during April 2017 to January 2018. A total number of 493 affected websites were used for malware propagation.”

“As per the information reported to and tracked by National Informatics Centre (NIC), a total number of 74 and 6 Government websites hosted on NICNET were hacked during the year 2017 and 2018 (till February) respectively.”

The same day, Minister of State for Home Affairs informed Rajya Sabha:

“As per the data maintained by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a total of 9622, 11592 and 12,317 cyber-crime cases were registered during the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively.”

Quoting Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report of 2017, a recent report published by The Hindu informed:

“As per the report, India continues to be second most impacted by spam and bots, third most impacted by network attacks, and fourth most impacted by ransomware.”

“In 2017, 5.09% of global threats detected were in India, slightly less than 5.11% in 2016. The U.S. (26.61%) was most vulnerable to such attacks, followed by China (10.95%).”

“The global threat ranking is based on eight metrics — malware, spam, phishing, bots, network attacks, web attacks, ransomware and cryptominers.”

As for the second part of the question, it may be said that it is difficult to clearly identify the exact sources or origins of most of the cyber-attacks.

Posted on June 18, 2018