India 15th most dangerous country worldwide to surf web

India is the 15th most dangerous country when it comes to dangers associated with surfing the web. India ranked five notches higher, at 10th place, when it came to 'local infection' vulnerabilities due to use of removable USB drives, CDs and DVDs, and other 'offline' methods. Sanjib Kr Baruah reports.

India is the 15th most dangerous country when it comes to dangers associated with surfing the web, if a foreign survey is to be believed.

Illustration-on-web-surfing-by-Abhimanyu-Sinha

A survey by Russian cyber security laboratory Kaspersky found that 35.6% out of a sample of net users were attacked by web-borne threats during April-June, 19,938,954 internet-borne malware incidents occurred on the computers of survey-participants in India for the same period of study.

"This places India at the 15th place worldwide when it comes to the dangers associated with surfing the web," the company said, adding that the numbers were based on completely anonymous data obtained from its products installed on users' computers in India and was acquired with the full consent of the users involved.

India ranked five notches higher, at 10th place, when it came to 'local infection' vulnerabilities due to use of removable USB drives, CDs and DVDs, and other 'offline' methods.

"Overall, 49.6% of users in this country were attacked by local threats during April-June. This puts India in the 10th place worldwide," the report said. During this period, 53,974,712 local malware incidents were reported.

"The share of spam sent via computers and servers based in India was 2.52% in April-June 2013," the report added.

Last month, Kaspersky had detected a cyber espionage attack that stole at least 22 GB of data, including secret documents from 40 high-profile Indian establishments that included ministries, embassies, military and science institutes.