Symantec – a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions – has initiated a two-pronged move to combat threats from cybercriminals, in the wake of online criminals beginning to use Haiti earthquake to scam Good Samaritans.

On one hand it is creating awareness among people at large and on the other, professionals at its Security Response Centre in Pune are trying to create a solution for the problem.

Speaking to Financial Chronicle on Tuesday, Shantanu Ghosh, VP, Symantec India (product operations), said, “Advance fee fraud scam (called ‘419 fraud’ in technical parlance) are common and perpetrators are always looking for new attention-grabbing topics that can trick people into handing over their money. Something like the humanitarian crisis of the Haiti earthquake is, sadly, a prime target for scammers.”

“Our latest study suggests that in terms of cases of origin of such scam and also in terms of number of victims of such scams, India is in the top bracket globally,” he said.

Symantec Security Response Centre in Pune has geared up to provide customers with comprehensive, global, 24x7 internet security expertise to guard against such complex threats. The company has 250,000 censors across 200 countries, which are linked to the Pune centre to help detect these frauds and then create a vaccine for that.

This centre is part of Symantec's Centre of Innovation in Pune, which works on high-end product development in security, storage, and compliance domains. Symantec's other centre is based out of Chennai, which plays a key role in developing new solutions and enabling an environment of safe and secure computing for enterprises and consumers in India and globally.

Along with creating security solutions, Symantec is creating awareness about social engineering threats (hoodwinking people through e-mails), search engine poisoning and educating customers about the dos and the donts, Ghosh said.