As India sees over 40% increase in cyber crime cases, the cyber-criminals are now cashing on tragic news like Air Asia aircraft crash.

Some posts on social media claiming that the missing AirAsia plane has been found and that all its passengers are safe and alive. But once the user clicks on the news item link, it takes them to malicious websites, reports TheHackerNews.

The criminals are looking for people who are anxious and curious. These gullible are drawn to websites that send executable files to steal their personal information.

Home minister Rajnath Singh had admitted this month on the floor of parliament that India faced risk of increased cyber crime and the country remained vulnerable to indoctrination of the youth on the internet by terror outfits such as ISIS. He promised to scale up cyber-monitoring capacity of Indian security agencies.

A home ministry report says that 62,189 cyber crime incidents happened till June 2014 while, 71,780 cases of cyber fraud were reported in 2013 and 22,060 were reported in 2012. The previous year of 2011 saw 21,699 cases. Overall, this means that there has been a 40% jump in cyber crime in India.

The cyber attacks seem to be coming from a wide range of countries such as the European ones, Brazil, US, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Algeria, and UAE. Attackers usually masquerade themselves so it becomes difficult to point out the source of the attack.

What is cyber crime: Publication of obscene content, hacking, credit card, bank fraud, phishing, spamming and website intrusion.

Users need to protect themselves by taking following steps:

• Secure PCs, tablets and mobile phones with latest security software.
• Do not click on suspicious links or emails.
• Do not 'like' or share videos before making sure that the link is authentic
• Delete malware posts from Facebook wall.