NSC discusses plans to beef up cyber security
Disturbed over repeated cyber attacks where security gets compromised, the National Security Council(NSC) under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had a meeting and deliberated on various plans to beef up cyber security.
During the meeting, the present level of preparedness to deal with cyber security issues and a future plan of action was discussed by the National Security Council(NSC), official sources said here today.
A paper has also been brought out by the NSC Secretariat highlighting several outstanding issues like identification of critical information infrastructure, delineation of responsibilities, dissemination of early warning and incidence response, the sources said.
The agenda for further research and development was also discussed during the meeting, which comes close on the heels of recent hacking of CBI's website by a group called 'Pakistani Cyber Army'.
The attack had raised questions over the safety regulations of servers provided by National Informatics Centre, the organisation responsible for maintaining government servers.
The sources said that in order to synergize the strength of various organisations involved in Cyber security Research and Development, relevant competencies of the department were also discussed.
A report titled "Shadows in the Cloud" by a Canadian think-tank comprising "Information Warfare Monitor" and "Shadows Server" earlier this year said there was evidence of a cyber espionage network that compromised government, business and academic computer systems in India, especially the office of the Dalai Lama.
According to a Canadian firm, which investigated the hacking of the Dalai Lama's computer, as many as 12 computers of NIC had been hit by the Chinese hackers.
The report said the recovery and analysis of ex-filtrated data, included one that appears to be encrypted diplomatic correspondence, two documents marked "Secret", six as "Restricted", and five as "Confidential". These documents are identified as belonging to the Indian government.
"However, we do not have direct evidence that they were stolen from Indian government computers and they may have been compromised as a result of being copied onto personal computers.
"The recovered documents also include 1,500 letters sent from the Dalai Lama's office between January and November 2009. The profile of documents recovered suggests that the attackers targeted specific systems and profiles of users," the report said.
The sources said besides reports by well-established think-tanks, there were several notes drawing urgent attention of various key ministries about possible intrusion by hackers either based in China or Pakistan trying to infiltrate into the computers.
