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Bot attacks: India sees 280% rise in 2012

Ranked 13th in the 2011 list of affected cities, Pune climbs to 12th position in 2012: Symantec report

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If you are a frequent email user and reside in one of the major cities of the country, you are likely to get more spam messages.

According to a Symantec India report, India has seen 280% hike in the Bot attacks in 2012.

Pune, which ranked 13th in 2011, too has climbed a position to 12th among the Bot attack-affected cities in 2012.

Anand Naik, managing director (sales) of Symantec, said, “Worldwide, the targets for attack are knowledge workers who create the intellectual property. The presence of a large number of knowledge workers makes India a potential target for attackers, with IT services featuring in the top list of industries targeted for spam, phishing and viruses. In fact, India was home to 16% viruses and globally, it ranked second for virus prevalence, just behind the United States. India also ranked third for overall malicious code.”

He added, “Cyber criminals are attacking computers, cellphones or social networks. Their ultimate goal is to obtain personal information including banking details, phone numbers and email addresses of friends and business associates to steal the target’s identity.” The report also said that there was 42 percent surge in global targeted attacks in 2012 than in 2011. “Designed to steal intellectual property, these targeted cyber espionage attacks are increasingly hitting small businesses, which are the target of 31% of these attacks across the world. Small businesses are a stepping stone to reach larger companies,” it stated.

According to the cyber experts, Bot-infected computer activities can be classified as actively attacking Bots or Bots that send out spam zombies.

India is ranked first for spam zombies with 17% of spam zombies located in the country. Spam zombies are remotely controlled, compromised systems specifically designed to send out large volumes of junk.

Sanjay Katkar, CTO Quick Heal Technologies, said, “There is a huge increase in Bot infections in India where small and medium enterprises (SME) are growing. Computer at SMEs are normally vulnerable and easy target for infections. People here in India are still using decade old operating system (OS) like Windows XP.”

Cyber Safety consultant Niranjan Reddy said, “There has been an alarming increase in the number of cyber crimes. We need to combat and prevent this from happening by securing our computers and networks.”

Precautions

Less dependance on mobile devices for simple email to critical application like mobile payments can lessen the exploitation.

Good security habits like using latest OS, having data patches and service packs. Deploy appropriate security policies.

What is Bot
Bot-infected computers, or bots, are programs that are covertly installed on a user’s machine in order to allow an attacker to control the targeted system remotely through a communication channel, such as Internet relay chat (IRC), P2P or HTTP.

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