Malicious activity in internet in the form of worms, viruses and trojans is on the rise in India, according to a report by a systems management solutions providing company Symantec.
The report, comprising details of the last six months of 2007, said more than 65% of malicious attacks in India were through worms as compared to the global average of 22%.
?This is a clear indication that basic security patch updates are not being installed by users,? said Vishal Dhupar, managing director of Symantec India.
Malicious code propagations vectors like file sharing and executables were behind the high proliferation of viruses in India.
He said the rampant software piracy in India aided the spread of malware by the file sharing and executables mechanism.
Dhupar said the web is not the primary conduit of attack activity, as opposed to network attacks, and that online users can increasingly be infected simply by visiting everyday web sites.
In the past, users had to visit intentionally malicious sites or click on malicious email attachments to become a victim of a security threat. But now hackers are compromising legitimate web sites and using them as a distribution medium to attack home and enterprise computers.
The report noted that attackers are particularly targeting sites that are likely to be trusted by end users, such as social networking sites.
The use of social networking web sites in phishing attacks is symptomatic of the trend toward targeting people rather than computers.
This is a sign of caution for India too, as nearly 5-6 million of people are activity involved in social networking and spend approximately 25-75% of their time online in social networking in the country.
The report also found that attackers are seeking confidential end-user information that could be fraudulently used for financial gain and are less focused on the computer or device containing the information.
