India Raises Cyber Shield

"India will be rolling out a new cyber security system that will ensure that the country's critical Information Technology infrastructure is strengthened."

India will be rolling out a new cyber security system that will ensure that the country's critical Information Technology infrastructure is strengthened.

It’s done to prevent increasing cyber-attacks from across the globe.

It comes at a time when it's been revealed that India is among the top five countries whose data has been repeatedly compromised by American surveillance.

India is getting ready to roll out its own cyber snooping agency called the National Cyber Coordination Centre.

Its primary job is to carry out a real-time assessment of cyber security threats and also provide actionable reports.

The new architecture foresees a multi-layered protection, with responsibility allocated to various stakeholders, including critical ministries like defense, home and IT.

According to data compiled by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, more than 1,000 government websites have been hacked by cyber criminals in the last three years.

Those websites store critical and sensitive data concerning national security, exposing the gaps in the country's cyber security mechanism.

In early March, suspected Chinese hackers breached the computers of India's top military organization – it’s considered to be amongst the biggest such security breaches in the country's history.

Subho Roy is the Presidentof the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

“First of all I think it is important and long pending that we should have some framework in place to address cyber attacks on our vital installations… on our government facilities and a host of other things which we think are critical for our country's growth, development and the well being our citizens. So I would think this is a very welcome step and a little too late in the day perhaps but it is better late than never.”

Studies show internet usage has been rising exponentially and the country has the fastest internet traffic growth globally.

It’s expected to have nearly 400 million users by 2017, up from nearly 150 million in 2012.

Rajesh Chharia, Director and CEO of C J Online, the first operational private ISP explains why this move is critical.

“Right now we are having a small quantity of broadband internet penetration but the target given by the government is quite big. And when lot of people will come to join the internet family, at that time the security for securing the internet user is very important and our government is very aggressively doing that so that no one gets harmed from internet use.”

Chharia also explains why this new cyber policy is important.

“Definitely we are going to protect our entire critical infrastructure as well as our general infrastructure. Because when everything is moving online and everything is coming on to the internet cloud, it becomes a major responsibility to secure our system very strongly.”

Allaying fears of misuse, the government is taking steps to ensure that there is accountability.

And the Department of Electronics and Information Technology will act as the nodal agency.

There has been huge concern in India after Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower behind one of the most explosive government leaks in US history, exposed alarming details of a top-secret program to collect personal data of millions of web users.

Suketu Mehta is a renowned author.

“If the American government wanted to snoop on Manmohan Singh's g mail account, there is absolutely no legal sanction that would prevent it from doing so. So I would be very concerned if I was an Indian, the American government can find out who you are e mailing, who you are calling, who your lovers are, how much you earn, what you think of your country and family.”

Subho Roy plays down these fears.

“I would not put too much to that fear mainly because it has been done at the state level. I think compromising of individual's citizen data would be a rare case unless there is a specific case against the individual which is being monitored and there are rules for all of this.”

But the big question is whether India have the required expertise to prevent these cyber attacks?

Surveys indicate that the country needs as many as 500,000 professionals in the field within five years.

Currently, there are only about 37,000 cyber security professionals – a big gap between demand and supply.

“Creating this infrastructure requires a lot of trained manpower. We do have them in the sense that we have the largest number of IT producing countries but they need to be trained for a specific task which is not very easy. But this requires training for the same people in a slightly different manner and orientation. There is a serious lack of such engineers in our country.”

• India Raises Cyber Shield
• India cyber shield