Cyber hits mostly from Pakistan and China, says government

New Delhi: The Centre on Friday said that cyber criminals from Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and the US, among others, are mostly involved in hacking and launching attacks on computer networks of Indian organisations.

Moreover, these hackers are compromising computer systems in different parts of the world and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual systems from which the attacks are launched.

“In such cases, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) notifies the concerned organisation regarding the cyber attacks and requests for logs of network devices, servers and other related components for analysing the attacks and identifying the sources of attack,” said minister for communications and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

According to the logs as analysed and made available to CERT-In, the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of the computers from where the attacks originated belong to countries, including the US, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, the UAE and in Europe.

The minister said that there has been a rise in incidents of cyber attacks in the past years with increase in the proliferation of IT and related services. The trend in increase in attacks is similar worldwide.

Around 27,605 and 28,481 websites were hacked by various hacker groups during 2012 and 2013, respectively. “In 2014 and 2015 (till May), total number of security incidents, including the websites hacked, by various hackers as 32,323 and 9,057,” he added.