New Delhi: The number of defacement cases of India specific websites is on rise. This number especially went up in September, with hackers marring around 511 websites with the '.in' domain name.

According to the statistics by the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), which handles computer securities incidents in the country, 511 websites with '.in' domain name were defaced in September. The number of these websites defaced in August was 454. As many as 692 incidents of Indian website defacement were reported in popular domains including '.com' and '.org' in September compared to 762 reported in August

Of the total 692 Indian websites defaced, 141 were '.com' domain websites and the rest were '.in' websites. Website defacement is a form of hacking, usually the substitution of the original home page by a system cracker that breaks into a web server and alters the hosted website creating one of his own. Often the hacker replaces the site's normal content with a specific political or social message or erases content from the site.

Besides website defacement in September, 550 security incidents were also reported to CERT-In, of which 84 percent were incidents related to spreading of malware (malicious software) through website.