‘India 2nd Most Attacked In Cyber Warfare’ KTR Quotes Kaspersky Labs

Inaugurating the CII organized cyber security conference ‘Counter Measures to Face the Threats’ here on Friday, IT minister KTR said Kaspersky Labs had placed India as the 2nd most vulnerable country to cyber attacks.

IT minister, who was also the chief guest, the IT minister said that around 85 per cent of websites — both public and private — complained of being hacked at least once and stressed on the need to adopt cyber security measures to thwart such attacks. He pointed that neighboring China has 25 million cyber warriors guarding it, India lags far behind with only 22,075 cyber security professionals.

India is the second-most cyber attacks on mobile devices prone country with a major chunk of these intrusions designed for phishing and stealing banking details, a report by security software maker Kaspersky said.

Russian cyber security solutions firm Kaspersky Lab said Russia topped the list of attacks on mobile phones, accounting for 40.34 percent of all attacked unique users.

India, with 7.9 percent of attacks, stood at the second spot, followed by Vietnam (3.96 per cent), Ukraine (3.84 per cent) and the UK (3.42 percent).

Other countries in the top 10 included Germany (3.2 percent), Kazakhstan (2.88 per cent), the US (2.13 percent), Malaysia (2.12 percent) and Iran (2.01 percent).

During 2013, nearly 100,000 new malicious programs for mobile devices were detected, more than double the previous year’s figure of 40,059 samples, Kaspersky said.

“About 98.1 percent of all mobile malware detected in 2013 targeted Android devices,” it added.

The report also found that about four million malicious applications were used by cybercriminals to distribute mobile malware for Android-based devices.

“The majority of mobile malware in 2013 targeted users money. The number of mobile malware modifications designed for phishing, the theft of bank card information and money from bank accounts increased by a factor of almost 20,” it said.

Vulnerabilities in the Android OS architecture and its growing popularity were important factors behind the increase in Android banking Trojans in 2013.

Cybercriminals appear to have become obsessed with this method of making money. At the beginning of the year there were just 64 known banking Trojans, but by the end of 2013 Kaspersky Lab’s collection contained 1,321 unique samples.

The Conference assumes importance in the light of these findings and the IT Minister was quoting the same facts in his speech.