India now ranks 10th in the global list of spam-generating countries.
An underground economy report prepared by Symantec Corporation also reveals that customers of reputed Indian banks faced more than 1,000 unique phishing attacks between July 2007 and June 2008, which 'is an indication of a rapidly-growing underground economy in India'.
The underground economy report prepared by Symantec Corporation for the specified period provides information about the growing underground economy globally.
While it says, the value of the total advertised goods on the underground economy servers were more than $276 million globally during this period, it points out that 6 per cent of the total compromised computers across the world, were found in India during September 2008.
"The underground economy is a serious money-making business. With the increase in Internet penetration, the number of phishing attacks and spam attacks is also rapidly growing in India," said Symantec Corporation Vice-president (India operations) Shantanu Ghosh.
"Spam and phishing are popular activities in the underground economy as they have a low barrier of entry and high returns," Ghosh added.
The report observed more than 1,000 phishing attacks on customers of reputed Indian banks through emails during the 12-month duration of the report. The report also came across more than 600 phishing URLs that had IP addresses hosted in India.
"All this has increased the spam generation from India and moved it from the 15th spot to the 10th in the global spam generation list, while the US continue to be the topper," he added.
During September this year, Symantec teams found that more than six per cent of the total compromised computers, termed as 'zombie machines', were in India.
"In case of the number of zombie machines, India is among the top 10 countries in the world," Ghosh stated. The report also talks about the extensive use of internet relay chat forum by underground economy players. The value of the total advertised goods on these servers was more than $276 million while the potential worth of the top seller is $4.6 million, the report says.
It adds, information related to credit cards accounted for 31 per cent of the overall advertisement sale. Groups such as ShadowCrew, Grifters, Cardersmarket, CarderPlanet and Russian Business Network have been known for underground economy operations. "We have spotted 69,130 distinct active advertisers on underground economy servers during July-2007 to June-2008. All of them jointly posted 4,43,21,095 messages regarding the sale of data, critical information or pirated softwares," Ghosh stated.
