In New Delhi: India is the third highest spam originating country in the world, contributing four percent to the worldwide spam volumes. In the APJ region however, India ranked first and contributed 21 percent to the regional total. Six percent of the world spam zombies and 28 percent of the APJ regional spam zombies resided in India. One percent of the world phishing hosts and seven percent of the regional phishing were in India.
This was revealed in the Symantecs latest Internet Security Threat Report volume XV released today, which highlights key trends in cybercrime from January 1st, 2009 to December 31st, 2009. The report saw continued growth in both the volume and sophistication of cybercrime attacks. It warned that many criminals had moved on from simple phishing scams to more complicated attacks, and were even targeting enterprises.
The cyber criminal world has been unaffected by the global economy, said Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Symantec, India.
He added that attackers have evolved from simple scams to highly sophisticated and focused campaigns. According to Symantec the scale of these attacks and the fact that they originate from across the world, makes this a truly international problem requiring global co-operation.
The report stated that cybercriminals have turned their attention toward enterprises, given the potential for monetary gain from compromised corporate intellectual property (IP). The report found that attackers are leveraging the abundance of personal information openly available on social networking sites to synthesise socially engineered attacks on key individuals within targeted companies.
Another key point of the report was the unabated increase in Web-based attacks. The report stated that attackers are leveraging social engineering techniques to lure unsuspecting users to malicious Web sites.
In 2009, India ranked second for origin for Web-based attacks in APJ, with 16 percent of the APJ total. This is a significant increase from the previous reporting period, when India accounted for less than one per cent of Web-based attacks in the region. Globally in 2009, India ranked seventh with three percent of the worldwide total.
The United States and China maintained the first and second spots respectively in the rankings as the top nations of origin for various types of cyberattacks in 2009 compared to 2008.
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