Cybercriminals have gone on a rampage. According to data revealed by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team ( CERT-In), more than 14,000 websites were hacked till October this year, a sharp increase of 57 percent from 2009.

The CERT-In data says in 2009 the number of attacks was 9,180, it rose to 14,232 in 2011 and in the first 10 months of this year itself has surpassed the 14,300-mark, 14,392 to be precise. In 2010, about 16,126 websites were hacked in 2010.

The numbers are however lesser than 308 sites hacked last year (till October). A total number of 201 and 303 government sites were hacked till October in 2009 and 2010 respectively. 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. The CERT-In figures come days after Minister of State for Communications and IT Milind Deora revealed in the Parliament that about 294 websites of various government departments and ministries were attacked by hackers during the period between January-October 2012.

Recently, Anonymous took down BSNL's website to protest against controversial Section 66A of the IT Act, 2000. Even Kapil Sibal's website had suffered cyber attack recently.