151 govts hacked but 3.24 lakh scams averted in India in 3 years: Govt

According to Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, 50 government websites were hacked in the year 2022-23.

New Delhi, Feb 04: The digital revolution in India due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's various initiatives to connect the rural areas of the country with high-speed internet networks has exponentially increased the risk of cyber attacks.

The government data clearly indicates how cyber attacks have increased in the last three years. According to the government data, 151 government websites have been hacked since 2020. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Communications, Electronics, and Information Technology told Rajya Sabha on Friday that a total of 59, 42 and 50 websites of the Central Government Ministries/Departments and State Governments were hacked during the years 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively.

In a written reply to a parliamentary question raised by CPI MP Binoy Viswam, the minister said that 50 government websites were hacked in the year 2022-23 alone while citing the data from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a nodal agency to deal with cyber security threats like hacking and phishing.

Notably, 3,24,620 scams were detected and prevented between 2020 and 2022. "CERT-In has further informed it has detected and prevented 2,83,581, 4,32,057, 3,24,620 malicious scams during the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively," ANI quoted him as saying in Rajya Sabha.

He also informed that the CERT-In tracked 6, 7 and 8 data breach incidents related to government organisations in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively. " There have been attempts from time to time to launch cyber-attacks on Indian cyberspace from both outside and within the country. It has been observed that such attacks compromised 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 launched," he added

It has to be noted that there have been two major cyber attacks in India in the recent past that had taken place that put the system under duress. First was on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the second one was a snag reported at Mumbai airport's Terminal 2.