India Placed Fifth in Cybercrime Worldwide Rankings

In completing its Global Internet Security Threat Report on worldwide cybercrime in December 2009, Symantec Corp. has attributed India’s rise to the fifth (as opposed to the seventh place in 2009 and eleventh place in 2008) place due to most of its cybercriminals being able to commit crimes without fear of prosecution in a country as it actively gains broadband access to the World Wide Web. Among the other developing countries on this list are Brazil, Russia, Poland and Vietnam.

In also describing the methods that hackers use to commit cybercrime, the approach has moved away from the email method of acquiring important personal information such as bank account and credit card numbers to social networking sites.

Symantec Vice-President David Freer says that social networking sites are fairly easy to victimize as most of the people in any particular online community (any social networking site) trust each other explicitly, and thus fall prey to malicious ware being downloaded onto a user’s PC once a file has been opened on the social networking site.

India ranks second in the Asia-Pac region, with an average of 788 ‘bots’ every day being deployed for the purpose of cybercrime along with China, Japan and Australia doing their fair share of damage as well.
Interestingly, using information on social networking sites, most hackers are now targeting enterprises from which large financial gains can be made on gaining access to the company’s intellectual property as well.
India only now is behind Brazil, China, US and Germany which hold the top spots for cybercrime worldwide.