Over 14,000 websites have been hacked by cyber criminals till October this year, an increase of nearly 57 per cent from 2009.

While the number of websites hacked in 2009 stood at 9,180, it grew to 14,232 in 2011 and in the first 10 months of this year itself it has already crossed the 14,300-mark.

About 16,126 websites were hacked in 2010, while 14,392 websites were hacked in the year 2012 (till October), as per the information tracked and reported by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

To check hacking and cyber crimes, the government has conducted six cyber security mock drills since November 2009 to assess preparedness of organisations to withstand cyber attacks, Minister of Communications and IT Kapil Sibal had said in Parliament.

He had said ministries and departments have been advised to carry out their IT system audit regularly to ensure robustness of their systems.

A total of 294 websites belonging to various ministries and government departments were hacked in the January-October 2012 period.

During May-June, 2012, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were launched against a number of government websites by various hacker groups. A DDoS attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

Sibal said there is, however, no proposal to establish an autonomous institution on cyber security.

Further, he stated that according to National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) a total of 696, 1,322 and 2,213 cyber crime cases were registered under the IT Act and cyber crime related IPC sections in 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.

A total of 1,184 persons were arrested for cyber crime under the IT Act, while 446 people were arrested under IPC section of cyber crimes in 2011.

A total of 157 cases were registered for hacking under IT Act in 2011, while 65 persons were arrested for the same. For loss/damage to computer resource/utility, 826 cases were registered and 487 persons arrested.

Likewise, 496 cases were registered for obscene publication/transmission in electronic form and 443 persons were arrested.

Under the IPC sections of cyber crime maximum number of cases were registered for forgery (259) in 2011 and 277 people were arrested for it. For criminal breach of trust/fraud, 118 cases were registered and 129 people arrested.