The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Secure your PC or be hacked!

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Saturday, Sep 27, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Secure your PC or be hacked!

Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD: With threats of hacking of websites and computers evolving into an organised crime worldwide, it has become imperative for enterprises and individual computer users to secure their systems.

What started as a nuisance by a few youngsters by writing ‘virus codes’ to corrupt data or deface websites, turned out to be a criminal activity of stealing confidential information for financial gain or illegal activities, said Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product Operation, Symantec Corporation, here on Wednesday. The company with global intelligence network reported 136 per cent rise in malicious code threats compared to last year, targeting end users.

These threats operated at different levels in the form of ‘viruses’ and ‘worms’ (software embedded into system without the user’s knowledge and distrubtion of the same among several PCs), spam mails, phishing and Bot computers (a computer that is compromised by an outsider to use it for a wrong purpose) and Trojans.

While several major websites were prone to hacking, another major concern was the availability of tools to help phishing attack.

While 80 per cent of spam emails were in the text form, some were also sent as image scan, jpg or pdf formats making use of social networking sites for targeting end users.

Symantec identified 5,060,187 ‘bot’ infected computers including 38,502 in India and Indian enterprises. He suggested regular safekeeping of the computers.

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