— PHOTO: G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR

DATA ON DATA THEFT: Vishal Dhupar (left), Managing Director, Symantec India, and Prabhat Kumar Singh, Director, Security Response, releasing the Internet security threat report in Bangalore on Thursday.

BANGALORE: As India's online economy grows, so does its vulnerability to attacks by Internet's baddies. In fact, the country is the hub for no fewer than 40 command-and-control servers which form the back-bone of a flourishing global and parallel `fraud economy', which thrives on data theft, trade in stolen corporate secrets and the wholesale compromise of credit cards.

The bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report for the second half of 2006, released here on Thursday by the infrastructure software leader, Symantec, quantifies the Net's dangers for India-based lay and corporate users. This became possible because of the establishment in Pune six months ago of Symantec's latest (and eighth) global security response centre.

Summarising the findings flowing from 40,000 sensors embedded in 180 countries, Vishal Dhupar, Symantec's Managing Director for India and SAARC, said big bucks, not kicks, motivated much of the malicious activity on the Internet today: A sophisticated `fraud food chain' had evolved, where multiple players specialising in `phishing' (tricking some one into giving confidential information), `spamming' (sending bulk junk mail) and the control of `bots' (short for robot programmes) all cooperated in deadly deals to attack thousands of unknowing victims whose computers were used as launching pads to propagate more `malware'.

The web browser Internet Explorer — possibly because of its ubiquity — is the single most targeted Web application, accounting for 77 per cent of all attacks. The Open Source Mozilla browser was attacked 40 per cent of the time.

Detailing the India-specific findings, Symantec's Director, Security Response, Prabhat Kumar Singh, said on an average there were 277 active computers infected by `bots' every day during July to December 2006. Mumbai led with 38 per cent of these computers with New Delhi (25 per cent), Bangalore (15 per cent) and Chennai (10 per cent) being the other major centres for compromised computers. In a chilling demonstration of the sort of underworld activity thriving on the Net, Mr. Singh played back intercepted messages which offered stolen credit card details and verification values; lists of compromised computers or details of online bank accounts... to the highest bidder. The going price in the U.S. for verified credit card detail was $1-$6, while a stolen PayPal record (the online payment account) fetched up to $500.

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