Cyber crimes in India have seen a sudden spurt. Cyber crimes have gone up by 60 per cent in 2012 at 3,500 as against 2,070 in the previous year.
The figures collected by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) give a graphic description of how cyber crimes have spread across the country. Maharashtra topped the list with 561 (393 in 2011) crimes, followed by Andhra Pradesh with 454 (372) and Karnataka 437 (160).
The data found that majority of the crimes are being done by criminals in the age group of 18 to 30.
“Financial offences dominate cyber crimes. Of late, we have noticed an increase where the fraudsters hacking into email accounts of companies and of customers. They read the entire email thread and lure the customers to deposit money in a fake account, duping both,” T.S. Uma Maheswara Rao, Inspector of Police (Cyber Crime Police Station, Hyderabad), told
The aggregate losses suffered by customers and companies in the last one year in Hyderabad were put at Rs 2 crore.
The NCRB, which monitors and records crimes of all sorts across the country, has compiled a detailed cyber crime scene in the country, giving a break-up of cases under the IT Act and the Indian Penal Code. The list includes a variety of crimes – disgruntled employees breaking into systems, eve-teasing, revenge, extortion and financial crimes.
What’s interesting to know is that, the States that registered very low number of cyber crimes in 2011 saw sudden jump. Haryana, which registered just three cases under IPC in 2011, filed 116 cases in 2012.
Managing the security of devices, small business systems, and large enterprise networks has become more complex than ever before.
“Users are breaking down the PC monoculture by embracing a wider variety of platforms, each with its own user interface, Operating System, and security model.
This divergence in computing experience has further expanded opportunities for cyber criminals and other threat actors to gain profit, steal information, and sabotage their targets’ operations,” Sharda Tickoo of Trend Micro, said.
“”Our recent report found that 7.70 per cent of all spam across the world was being sent from India, taking second place among the spam sending countries. About 1.75 per cent of computers in India were found accessing Botnet (that makes victim’s computer its slave) connected servers,” she said.