Tag Archive for: GOVT.

Govt To Set Up Centre Of Excellence For Cyber Security In Capital City | Bhubaneswar News

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Bhubaneswar: The state government has decided to set up a centre of excellence (COE) for cyber security to help police personnel effectively deal with the challenges posed by cyber crooks. The state-owned Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC) is planning to set up the centre of excellence in Bhubaneswar to cater to the needs of the state police.
The proposed COE will have cyber intelligence, investigation and forensic units along with tools, technology, process, and trained manpower to combat the cyber criminals. One of the key aspects of this project is to have an effective cyber security workforce to help the police personnel in investigating cyber crimes.
“We have already floated an expression of interest and have received offers from some private IT companies. Their offers are being evaluated,” OCAC’s joint general manager (technical) Saroj Kumar Tripathy said.
The broader objective of the proposed centre of excellence is to strengthen the future cybersecurity environment by expanding cyber education, coordinating and redirecting research and development efforts across the government departments. The COE will conduct planning, designing, and analysing cyber security capacity building programme for the government of Odisha.
The COE will have a centralised analytics platform to capture data from various sources and analyse them to provide actionable intelligence to the law enforcement agencies. Data obtained from various sources can be utilised to determine the relationships that exist in the data through various analytical engines, finding a solution for crime detection.
The centralised analytics platform can help cops identify illegal activities being carried out in deep and dark web such as drugs, human trafficking, credit card frauds and fake passports. The platform can also identify rumours and fake or provocative materials circulated on social media.
The state, which reported 1,931 cybercrime cases in 2020, saw a marginal increase in 2021 with the police registering 2,037 cases, clocking nearly 5.5% rise.
In bulk of the cases, cyber crooks took away money from the victims by offering them high returns through different schemes, on purchases of pharmaceutical…

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No cyber attack on census data centre, optimum security in place, says govt

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A multi-layered security approach has been adopted for the safety of census data and there has been no cyber attack or data hacking incident in the system, Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said Tuesday.


He said the intent of the government for conducting Census 2021 was notified in the Gazette of India on March 28, 2019, but due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the census and related field activities have been postponed until further orders.


“Multiple layered security approach has been adopted for security and safety of census data. Data is encrypted at the data collection device, during the transmission and at servers and storage.


“Advisories from National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) and Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) are implemented to make the data centres secure,” Rai said in Lok Sabha.


Replying to another question, the minister said, “No cyber attack or data hacking incident has been observed in the data centre or its disaster recovery sites of the office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


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Govt mulls nodal body to secure power grids

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The government will create a computer security incident response team, or CSIRT, at the Central Electricity Authority to avert cyber attacks on the country’s power grid, said Alok Kumar, secretary, union power ministry.

According to media reports, cyber attackers linked to the Chinese military had infiltrated the network of seven power grid hubs in north India in April.

The emergency response team will be monitoring cyberattacks and make initial analysis. “Cyber security is an important area, and the Centre reviews it from time to time. It has issued guidelines to build capacity of the utilities,” Kumar said.

“We will have a CSIRT. There are computer emergency response teams (CERTs) for each sector. CSIRT is the central nodal point at the Central Electricity Authority, which will gradually have the capacity to monitor cyber attacks and also take initial analysis in coordination with CERT-In.”

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, coordinates with the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre to oversee cybersecurity operations for critical sectors.

In April, power minister R.K. Singh said three attacks were carried out on the power grid in strategically-located Ladakh since December 2021 but the hackers did not succeed because safeguards were in place to thwart such intrusions.“Our defence against cyber attack is strong. There were probing attacks in December, January and February, but they did not succeed,” he had said.

On 17 March, Mint exclusively reported that the…

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Sensitive citizen data illegally transmitted by TDP Govt, says Andhra Assembly panel

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The panel constituted in March 2022 to investigate whether Pegasus spyware was used by the Chandrababu Naidu government has submitted an interim report in the Andhra Pradesh legislative Assembly.

A House Committee that was formed by the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly has concluded that a large volume of data from the state’s servers were transmitted to unknown external sources during the Chandrababu Naidu government’s regime.

The Committee, headed by Tirupati MLA Bhumana Karunakar Reddy, in its report said “there was unauthorised and improper transmission of large amounts of sensitive data from the State Data Centre (SDC) to unknown external servers from November 30, 2018 to March 31, 2019.”

Presenting the report in the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday, Karunakar Reddy said the committee found that a large volume of data had been transferred from 18 State Data Centre (SDC) servers to several unknown external IP addresses and that the reason for this data transfer was unknown.

“The data was sent to TDP leaders who used it to make unlawful gains during the elections held in 2019. The TDP leaders have misused the data. There was large-scale deletion of voters’ names before the election,” Karunakar Reddy told the Assembly. The statement evoked angry reactions from the TDP members who demanded a copy of the complete report. The house committee only tabled two copies of the report in the Assembly.      

The State Data Centre (SDC) is where the state government’s servers and network devices are stored. As part of the Praja Sadhikara Survey (smart pulse survey) organised in 2016, the previous government had collected individual details from all citizens. The Naidu government had said that the data was to ensure that government schemes would reach the beneficiaries. Details collected included aadhar card, ration card, voter ID, property tax, electricity bill, driving licence, vehicle registration details, gas connection details, bank account details, water bill details, caste certificate, income certificate, birth certificate etc. It is this data that was stored in SDC and later transferred to external servers, concluded the committee.

“The…

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