India faced cyber attacks from foreign countries like China, Pakistan during lockdown: Centre

At a time when India was under lockdown to curb spreading of Covid-19, the country faced series of cyber-attack attempts from foreign countries, especially, from China and Pakistan, the government informed a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology.

The 24th report of the standing committee on IT, tabled in Lok Sabha by panel chairman Shashi Tharoor, said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) apprised the House panel that there were increased cyber-attack attempts from foreign countries, especially, China and Pakistan.

"There was an increased demand for Antivirus and Vulnerability Assessment for hosting new applications and services related to Pandemic and lockdown," the report said quoating government.

The government also informed the panel that, "Additional security controls were deployed for monitoring and countering attack attempts from these countries. Additional resources were deployed in shifts to meet these requirements round the clock. Security Audit initiated and completed using trusted networks (VPN) and restricted required port access was opened for Audit."

"In order to provide endpoint security during Work from Home, roaming client of Antivirus solution were provisioned. National Informatics Centre (NIC) had rolled out guidelines and rosters, in line with guidelines from Ministry of Health, for all the employees commuting to office," Meity informed the panel.

On specific challenges faced by NIC during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry stated that "the pandemic has been an unfortunate and unique experience for all of us. NIC managed to provide its un-interrupted seamless services during such difficult times."

The primary challenge for the NIC was to keep the critical services up and running. It was challenging to keep the services like video conferencing, web portals, IT domains and citizen centric applications up and running with zero downtime, the IT Ministry said.

To sustain seamless functioning of critical government applications, it was imperative for Data Centre facilities to be up and running all the time. The second major challenge was 24x7 functioning of the Data Centre and associated IT infrastructure, the Meity informed the panel.