With several government websites hacked or defaced over the last few days, members of the hacker group “Anonymous” have labelled the country’s cyber security setup as a “joke”, and said they could easily hack into servers of most government organisations.
While the import of cyber security is now recognised across the globe, both the Centre and the state government have done little to raise the bar.
Answering a question in Parliament last month, Union minister of state for communications and information technology Sachin Pilot said, 248 government websites had been hacked last year, and 133 in the first three months of this year. The figures notwithstanding, there is no nodal agency in the country to look after cyber security, experts pointed out.
Under Section 70A of IT Act, amended in 2008, the Centre is required to designate a government organisation to secure Critical Information Infrastructure Protection, or to secure cyber space. But four years on, no such organisation has been designated.
In replies to various questions on cyber security in Parliament, HRD minister Kapil Sibal and Mr Pilot have referred to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team as the agency to tackle cyber issues. But In-CERT can only respond to cyber incidents; preventive measures are not its domain.
In fact, Anonymous hackers made a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the CERT website about 10 days ago. Though CERT denied any attack, it quickly issued an advisory about hackers attacking websites using DoS. The government had, a few years ago, created National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) to take care of cyber security.