Statistics: There Were More Than 100 Hacked Government Websites During Jan-Nov 2018

On December 18^th, the Parliament updated the latest statistic regarding that more than 100 government websites have been hacked in 2018, and even some websites which are under the management of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) belong to this list.

S S Ahluwalia, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT

When replying to Look Sabha, S S Ahluwalia, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT, revealed that there were 172 hacked government websites in the year 2017 and 105 ones in the year 2018. The information hailed from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in for short). Among those, NICNET under the National Informatics Centre (NIC) suffered from the hacks of 74 websites in 2017 and 31 sites in 2018.

Along with IT’s dynamic nature and steadily increasing cyber threats, network owners must do much more things to protect their networks and enhance the controllability of the corresponding security.

There have been a lot of measures offered by the government to boost the security level on the internet, as well as to fight against hacking and breaches.

According to a report sent to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the number of financial fraud incidents regarding PoS systems, ATMs, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and cards which have been listed in the years 2016, 2017, and 2018 is 03, 14, and 06, respectively. The statistics were based on the data collected before December 2018.

The Reserve Bank of India has offered the alarming statistics concerning fraud cases affecting credit cards, Internet banking, and ATM/debit cards which are 1,191, 1,372, 2,059, and 921 ones in the periods of 2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019, respectively. These numbers were last updated on September 30^th, 2018.

The Minister also said that several consultancies and alerts have been provided by the CERT-IN to help network owners to update the newest cyber threats and how to struggle against these threats. This aims to bring a safe environment to network owners and users when exploiting digital technologies. Besides, there have been 28 advisories which institutions and users can refer to secure their digital payments.

The CERT-In uncovered that in 2017, 53,081 incidents regarding cybersecurity were under observation and among those, there were 53 incidents involving ransomware. S S Ahluwalia added.