The Parliament was informed on Wednesday that over 21,400 Indian websites were hacked in 2019 up to October.
Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of state for electronics and IT, in a written reply to Lok Sabha said: “As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total number of 33,147, 30,067, 17,560 and 21,467 Indian websites were hacked during the year 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (till October), respectively.”
He also informed the Parliament that there have been several attempts made to launch cyber attacks on Indian cyberspace.
He said that it has been observed that attackers are compromising computer systems located in different parts of the world and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual systems from which the attacks are being launched.
Dhotre said, “According to the logs analyzed and made available to CERT-In, the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers from where the attacks appear to be originated belong to various countries including China, Pakistan, Netherlands, France, Taiwan, Tunisia, Russia, Algeria, and Serbia.”
Responding to a query, he said that the IT Ministry during the year 2018 – 2019 (till August) has received a total of 4,192 and 3,847 complaints about blocking of URLs under certain provisions of section 69A of the IT Act, respectively.
“Government has taken appropriate action for blocking of URLs following the norms prescribed in the rules notified under section 69A of the Act,” he said.
The minister also said that under the Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, government can block any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in any computer resource in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offense relating to above.
