Screening of staff made mandatory to check info leak

To plug information leak in the wake of corporate espionage case, the Centre has issued stringent guidelines for its departments, making security screening of personnel outsourced from elsewhere mandatory and avoiding doing confidential work on computers with net connection.

The guidelines, which say external memory devices must not be connected to the USB drives on these computers and that misuse of photocopying machines should be prevented, were issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs last week.

The MHA came out with the guidelines against the backdrop of the leak of classified information from some ministries including the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

"The ministries and departments will ensure that confidential work is not done on computers connected to the internet and it must to ensured that external memory device cannot be connected to the USB drives on these computers," the guidelines said.

All bureau heads have been asked to designate such computers on which confidential work will be done.

The guidelines have been circulated among all the Ministries on June 30. The HRD Ministry and several others having a sizeable number of staff recruited through outsourcing, have circulated the guidelines to all bureau heads, asking them to ensure that security screening of all such staff has been done.

Raising concern over the misuse of photocopying machines, the guidelines said officers of the sections concerned where the equipment are installed must get those code-locked.

"Counting devices in photocopying machines and other office equipment should be made good use of so that unauthorised copying is not done. CCTV cameras can also be deployed judiciously," the document said.