CERT June Report
By Bala Shah

CERT-In also known as the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team has been tasked with protecting India and Indians from the computer savvy baddies on the internet. CERT runs under the aegis of the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology

CERT-In is the National Incident Response Centre for major computer security incidents in its constituency i.e. Indian cyber community.  It also plays a key role in raising security awareness among the Indian cyber community, and to provide technical assistance and advice to them to help recover from computer security incidents.

While any such computing task is very complex, challenging and costly in a developing country like India, CERT can be credited for releasing a monthly report of all that it has done.  This report gives an idea of how many people actually complain to this central body. And how the powers that be see serious computer crime in India.  The CERT-IN Security Bulletin for June 2010 has the following highlights

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In June, 70 security incidents were reported to CERT-In from various National/ International agencies. 47 % incidents related to Phishing were reported in this month. Other reported incidents include 26 % unauthorized scanning, 19 % virus/worm under the malicious code category and 8% incidents related to technical help under the Others category.

In this month CERT -In tracked 39600 bot -infected computers existing in India. The concerned ISPs were intimated to dis-infect the bot infected systems to mitigate botnets, Cyber Intrusion during June 2010
 
690 Indian websites were defaced during June 2010.
 
CERT -In tracked 234 open proxy servers functioning in India during June 2010. All the concerned ISPs were alerted immediately to shut down the open proxy servers. A bar chart of open proxy servers tracked during this year is shown in the figure.

CERT-In is tracking malicious web sites/URLs on regular basis. In this month CERT-In tracked 477 websites infected with malicious contents. A user visiting these websites/URLs is redirected to malicious sites which downloading malicious code such as virus, worm, trojan. keylogger, rootkit on to the user's computer. The website owners were informed to remove the infection from these websites and were advised to strengthen the security of their websites.
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Most Governments in the world lack the money and resources to get the best security minds in the private sector to switch to public service.  Only a small percentage of cyber victims in India report the crimes against them.  Having said all this, the CERT openness in publishing such monthly reports has to be commended.