With the aim to improve the cybersecurity talent in Asia-Pacific region Prime Minister Narednra Modi government has decided to offer PhD scholarships in cyber security to candidates from Asia Pacific, who do their PhD in any of the 100 leading universities of India, including IITs, IISc and other universities.
While speaking at Asia Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team (APCERT) Open Conference in New Delhi, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad said that innovation in cybersecurity is a big focus under the government's programme of supporting PhD scholars in digital technologies.
Minister informed that there were more than 100 cyber security product companies in India and it was proposed that in furtherance of the Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) preference shall be provided by all procuring entities in the government to domestically manufactured and produced Cyber Security Products.
He also said that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology was in the process of working with Data Security Council of India to conduct Challenge Grant for cyber security as a means to encourage budding start-ups to develop innovative technologies.
First ever APCERT Open Conference in India and the first in South Asia was held in New Delhi. India was selected to be part of the steering committee of APCERT along with 6 (Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan) other countries to shape the agenda for the next 2 years across the region.
In India, cybersecurity professionals got an opportunity to attend a highly content rich technical conference, interact with the Asia Pacific incident response leaders in cyber security and the International community got to see the skills and depth of some of the cyber security start-ups from India.
The spectrum of topics covered included setting up sectoral CSIRTS, Nation State exploits, vulnerabilities of block chain, secure communication in industrial internet, cyber crime in financial technology ecosystem, building a sharing economy, machine learning, malicious behaviour in encrypted traffic, mobile security and Artificial Intelligence.
