Cyber Crime emerging as an organised crime in India

Bengaluru

According to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) released by Symantec in Asia Pacific, the country ranked second.

Briefing newspersons on the ISTR, Tarun Kaura, Director for solution product management for Asia Pacific at Symantec, cautioned that cyber crime has become an organised criminal network in the country with groups hiring hackers and establish best business practices and professional bussiness to increase the efficiency of their attacks against enterprises and consumers.

"This new class of professional cyber-criminal spans the entire system of attackers, extending the reach of enterprise and consumer hearts and fuelling the growth of online crime" he pointed out.

Mr Tarun said they had extensive resources and a highly skilled technical staff, who operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off. Some cyber criminal attackers even create call centre operations to increase the impact of their scams, he added.

With a young demographic, millions of mobile connections, rapid adoption of cloud and icreasing integration of ICT in critical infrastructure, India continued to be a top source as well as destination for cyber attacks, he noted.

"Once considered the spam capital of the world, India had seen a steady decrease in the amount of spam originating from its borders" he said, adding, the country however continued to rank as the third top source of overall malicious activity, including spam, malware and polishing hosts. The United States and the United Kingdom were the top two sources.