New Delhi: Amid growing concerns of cyber security threats, hackers had wrecked the Indian cyberspace and defaced 612 websites in March, showing a two-fold rise in such crimes compared to February.

According to statistics of the Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In), which handles computer securities incidents in the country, 612 websites were defaced in March compared to 214 websites in February.

Website defacement is a form of malicious hacking. It is 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 the content from the site.