The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has launched a NIC-CERT, which it says will work to prevent and predict cyber attacks on government utilities. NIC is one of the prime builder of e-governance applications and websites in India. Most of the government websites and web services across the country including states are run by it.
While launching the NIC-CERT in New Delhi, Union Minister for IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said that as part of its Digital India initiatives, the government has introduced a lot of its services online. Although this has made services very accessible to the citizens, it has also exposed them to the threats and vulnerabilities which are an inherent part of cyberspace. According to him NIC-CERT will help preventing and predicting cyber attacks.
In the recent past there has been an exponential growth in cyberattacks leading to concerns of data theft which led to the Government drafting the Data protection Act. As Internet with its ever expanding canvas of opportunities is touching the life's of people, it necessitates the requirement to upscale the existing security infrastructure, said the minister.
NIC-CERT has been setup with the objective of creating a comprehensive framework that integrates world class security components and inbuilt threat intelligence for detection, prevention and incident response. Using the tools the team will correlate events that would help in generating a canvas of the attack surface and identify the vulnerabilities and possible exploits. The gathered intelligence assimilated with the knowledge of the open web would give the CERT the ability prevent and predict attacks.
NIC's PAN-India connectivity and reach is one of its key strengths and this coupled with its enhanced ability to detect and prevent attacks would collectively upscale the Government's ability to protect its data.
NIC-CERT is aimed at enhancing the security posture of NIC and the Government which will in turn lead to enhanced trust of the citizens as the services offered to them would be configured in a framework that is secure by design. NIC-CERT will operate in close coordination and collaboration with sectoral CERT's and more so with Cert-in, said NIC.
