In February 2009, 718 security incidents were reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) from various national/international agencies. And in the same month, altogether 47 Indian websites were defaced as compared to January where there were 175 incidents of defacement.
According to CERT-In, altogether 70 per cent incidents related to spreading of malware through website compromise were reported in February. Twenty one percent of incidents related to virus/worm under the malicious code category, 4 per cent phishing incidents, 3 per cent unauthorized scanning, 1 per cent incidents related to spamming and 1 per cent incidents related to technical help under the ‘Others’ category were also reported in February.
In February, CERT-In tracked 07 C&C (Command & Control) servers and 590,362 bot-infected computers in India. The concerned ISPs were intimated to disinfect the bot-infected systems and C&C servers to mitigate botnets.
CERT-In also tracked 119 open proxy servers functioning in India during February 2009. 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.
Any proxy server that does not restrict its client base to its own set of clients and allows any other client to connect to it is known as an open proxy server. An open proxy server will accept client connections from any IP address and make connections to any Internet resource.
CERT-In also organised a one-day workshop ‘Web Application Security: Advanced Topics’ was conducted on February 9. The objective of this training workshop was to create awareness among IT professionals form Indian Government/Public sector IT infrastructure and user organisations on the advanced topics in web application security and to train them to handle advanced attacks with the hands-on practical sessions. Those who attended the workshop were from government, corporate and critical sector organizations.