F-Secure in discussions with state governments for secure Wi-Fi offerings

Finnish firm F-Secure said it was in discussions with state governments, including Delhi, on the role that it could play in offering secured Wi-Fi access across hotspots located in various cities.

F-Secure country manager India and Saarc Amit Nath told PTI that governments were looking at offering free Wi-Fi across cities like Delhi and Chandigarh. He added, as more cities adopted Wi-Fi, government had to be careful as public Wi-Fi could be misused by cybercriminals.

He said F-Secure was in discussions to figure out how its solutions could be implemented at these Wi-Fi hotspots to protect end-consumers with a sustainable revenue model built around it.

Nath, however, did not offer further details on the talks.

Nath said the security software market in India was estimated at $200 million, growing at about 20-22 per cent annually.

The report by F-Secure pointed out that Delhi (20 per cent) topped the list of cities, in terms of malware infections detected, followed by Hyderabad and Chennai (9 per cent each) and Chandigarh (7 per cent) in 2014.

According to the report, 'Botnet' related malware was the top malware infection in India.

In 'Botnet' hackers manage to take control of the user's computer and use it to spam, DDoS (Denial of Service (DoS) attack) or conduct other malicious activity to make substantial amounts of money.

Meanwhile, The Indian Express reported that F-Secure Labs' report titled, The State of Internet in India report had labelled New Delhi as the most infected city in 2014 out of 540 cities it reviewed.

Su Gim Goh, security advisor, F-Secure said this meant that the chances of getting infected in these cities were higher.

Banking malwares like Sality and Ramnit continued to dominate over the last two years, the report said. The Ramnit malware stole bank usernames and passwords and mostly spread through USB drives.

''On the mobile threat landscape, premium rate SMS is still the major reason behind a high number of SMS-related malware in the Android platform in India. This is in line with what the CERT-In (Computer Emergency Response Team of India) found in December of 2014,'' F-Secure said.

The company also detected the highest malicious activity on Android smartphones happening from Mumbai (22 per cent) followed by New Delhi, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Kolkata.