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: When Indira Gandhi National Open University’s (Ignou) first experiment with online testing collapsed last week, all fingers seemed to point at a malicious cyber attack. Reports suggest server went down when over a lakh hits were received during the exams meant for less than 10,000 people.

Though the real reasons are not yet out, it may be a sign of things to come. Twitter and Facebook took a hit two months back in a similar denial of service attack. In such attacks, hackers control thousands of computers and instruct them to communicate with the target Web site at the same time thus crashing the server and preventing legitimate users from accessing the site.

About 1.5 lakh zombie computers are being created every day, even as owners of zombie computers are unaware that their system is being used in this way. World’s second-largest security company, McAfee has counted 40 million new zombies created thus far in 2009. This means an average of almost 1.5 lakh (1,48,000 to be precise) new zombies created every day this year. Last quarter alone, 13 million zombies were created. Most zombies are created in the US, while India ranked seventh in zombie production, accounting for 3.4% of the zombies created last quarter.

These systems are hijacked to send spam to millions of email addresses. And spam volumes reached all time high last quarter, breaking the second quarter record by 10%. Spam, as a percentage of total email volume also set a new record, reaching 92% during the quarter. Compared with last year’s third quarter, spam is up 24%. India ranked number three and generated 5.3% of the total spam generated.

It is not hard to understand why spam and online attacks are increasing regularly. “It is easier to carry out such attacks. Literally, anyone can carry out such attacks,” explains Kartik Shahani, regional director, India & Saarc, McAfee. To demonstrate how easy it is, McAfee conducted a first of its kind workshop in India to give a few journalists a hands-on experience in creating malware. In a matter of few hours, non-hacker journalists could successfully spread real samples of malicious codes with the help of a step-by-step instructions manual.