Over 9,000 complaints of cyber frauds were received on National Consumer Helpline during the financial year 2020-21, Parliament was informed on Wednesday. As per the information provided by Ministry of Consumer Affairs, a total of 11,713 and 9,002 complaints of cyber frauds were received on National Consumer Helpline during the financial years 2019-20 and 2020-21, Minister of State for of Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

He noted that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) does not maintain any such database. The Minister said Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) at the Centre and states take appropriate legal action as per provisions of law against the cyber crime offenders.

The government helps states in combating cyber crimes by assisting them through various awareness schemes, and has taken a number of legal, technical and administrative measures to prevent cyber crimes, he added. These include various steps, including issue of alerts and advisories regarding latest cyber threats/vulnerabilities and countermeasures by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to protect computers and networks on a regular basis.

In response to a separate query, Chandrasekhar said CERT-In is mandated to track and monitor cyber security incidents in India. "CERT-In has reported that a total number of 17,560, 24,768, 26,121 and 25,870 Indian websites were hacked during the year 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 (upto October) respectively," he said.

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Chandrasekhar said there have been attempts from time to time to launch cyber-attacks on Indian cyber space. 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.

"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 Algeria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, USA, Vietnam etc," he added.

He noted that CERT-In also conducts regular training programmes for network/system administrators and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) of Government and critical sector organisations regarding securing the IT infrastructure and mitigating cyber-attacks. "Fifteen (15) and 17 training programs were conducted covering 708 and 4,801 participants during the year 2020 and 2021 (till October 2021) respectively," he said.

Asked whether the Government is considering standalone law for cyber security to cater to new-age cyber crimes, Chandrasekhar said presently, there is no such proposal with the Ministry. "Government is well aware of cyber security threats as the Internet grows and has developed multiple tools and policies including the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team to deal with the same. Presently, there is no proposal with the Ministry for a stand-alone law in this regard," he added.

First Published:Dec 1, 2021 5:37 PM IST