How India aims to protect key infrastructure amid rise in cyber attacks from across the border

Amid a rise in cyber attacks from across the border, the Modi administration is taking several initiatives to protect key infrastructure. Cybersecurity firm Norton said in its report that India recorded more than 1.8 crore cyber attacks in just the first three months of 2022.This means 200,000 attacks were recorded every day by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

In 2021, India was among the top three countries in Asia to experience most server access and ransomware attacks, according to IBM's X-Force Threat Intelligence team.

In the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2021, a 70 percent increase was observed in ransomware activity as per cybersecurity firm Trellix.

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A Nigerian server used Russian malware in a recent attack on Oil India’s critical infra in Assam and demanded $75,00,000 as ransom.

CERT-In, which is the nodal agency to deal with cyber security threats like hacking and phishing, was founded back in 2004 under the IT Ministry.

With countries like China, North Korea, Pakistan and others targeting India, New Delhi is working on boosting its security to curb such cyber attacks.

CERT-In, which strengthens the security-related defence of the Indian Internet domain, pointed out that over half of adversarial advanced persistent threat actor activity originated from Russian and Chinese-backed groups.

In order to tackle threats to critical infrastructure, the Modi administration is mulling setting up a specialised Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT).

Under news guidelines, even VPN service providers are being monitored and they are required to store users’ data for at least five years.

Union minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar had made it clear that virtual private network service providers that are not ready to comply with the new guidelines have the only option to exit from India.

“There is no opportunity for somebody to say we will not follow the rules and laws of India. If you don’t have the logs, start maintaining the logs. If you are a VPN that wants to hide and be anonymous about those who use its VPN and you don’t want to go by these rules if you want to pull out, then frankly you have no other opportunity but to pull out,” he said.

Rejecting the argument that the new rule may lead to cyber security loopholes in the system, Chandrasekhar said that the government is also not going to make any change in the rules on mandating entities to report the cyber breaches in their system within six hours of learning about it.

“The criminality and the cyber incidence, nature, type, shape, form of it are very complex. They have very sinister elements behind it. There are many state actors that are using the vulnerability. Those who commit these breaches can move on very quickly. Immediate reporting is fundamental to investigating, forensic analysis, situational awareness of the nature of the incident,” he said.

(With inputs from agencies)

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