3.13 lakh cybersecurity incidents reported till Oct

More than 3.13 lakh cybersecurity incidents were reported in India this year up to October, Parliament was informed on Thursday.

"As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 49,455, 50,362, 53,117, 2,08,456 and 3,13,649 cybersecurity incidents were reported during the year 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (till October) respectively," Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

He added that service providers, intermediaries, data centres and body corporate are mandated to report cybersecurity incidents to CERT-In within a reasonable time of occurrence or noticing the incident to have scope for timely action.

Dhotre said security incidents that shall be mandatorily reported to CERT-In as early as possible to leave scope for action include targeted scanning/probing of critical networks/systems, compromise of critical systems/information, unauthorised access of IT systems/data, and defacement of website or intrusion into a website and unauthorised changes such as inserting malicious code, links to external websites etc.

Apart from these, malicious code attacks, attacks on servers, identify theft, spoofing and phishing attacks, denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks, attacks on critical infrastructures, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and wireless networks, and attacks on applications such as e-governance, e-commerce etc also need to be reported, he said.