Alaska News

Cybercrime in India taking its toll socially, economically

Some 42 million Indians were the victims of cyber crime last year, to the cost of a whopping $8 billion, according to...um...a software security firm.

The latest heist? A group calling itself Turkish Ajan Hacker Group broke into the network of Dominos Pizza's Indian web site and stole the "details of about 37,000 accounts, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords and city details," according to Business Standard.

Get ready for ominous text messages, people: "We know who you are. We know what toppings you ordered."

A similar incident happened with Microsoft Store India earlier this year, the paper reports, quoting an independent security expert as saying, "Most websites, especially government sites, have little or no security protection. Second, these don't even have dedicated security professionals to manage the website and keep protect these from targeted attacks."

According to the software security firm Norton, that's costing India the big bucks (though pesky security software that has to be updated every few minutes ain't cheap either).

"The 'Norton Cybercrime Report 2012' found, based on experiences of more than 13,000 adults across 24 countries (including 1,000 from India), said direct costs associated with global consumer cybercrime are pegged at $ 110 billion over the past twelve months," India's Economic Times newspaper reports.

The paper quotes the report as saying that 66 percent of the Indian respondents claimed they have been a victim of cybercrime in their lifetime, while 56 percent said they got scammed last year.

No data was provided about how many of the respondents clicked on Twitter spam messages reading, "Somebody is spreading nasty rumors about you on Twitter."

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