The Hindu Business Line : Plan to protect vital IT infrastructure finalised

Crisis situations: The government has identified ‘crisis’ as relating to hacking, virus, ‘denial of service’ attacks, data centre disruption due to natural calamity, and even defacement of sites.

Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee

New Delhi, July 5 In the Hollywood action flick Die Hard 4.0, a computer hacker fired by the NSA, exploits the vulnerability of computer-controlled systems to unleash a series of cyber assaults on US’ vital infrastructure.

With the threat of sophisticated attacks on computer networks looming large in real world, the Government is now making efforts to secure its IT systems.

It has recently finalised a ‘National Crisis Management Plan’, in a bid to protect IT infrastructure in critical sectors such as petroleum, aviation, banking, power and telecom.

The Plan prepared by the Department of IT in consultation with other departments is the culmination of two years of work. Individual ministries will now work out their specific strategies for crisis management for their own sectors under this framework.

The plan identifies ‘crisis’ in the context of IT infrastructure — hacking, ‘denial of service’ attacks, virus attacks, data centre disruption due to natural calamity, and even defacement of sites.

“Today most of the critical economic sectors operate on an information infrastructure. So it deals with how to avert such crisis and how to deal with them, in case it occurs. The plan was finalised two-three months ago,” Mr R. Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, told Business Line.

The Plan recognises various types of crisis relating to cyber security and IT infrastructure and outlines the action to be taken in such situations.

It offers a broad framework within which the different sectoral plans are to be worked out. That process is already on,” he said.

Vulnerabilities exposed

The Committee on Financial Sector Assessment, in its report, has noted that while IT has revolutionised the way financial institutions and markets conduct business, it has also raised vulnerability to unexpected interruptions.

Despite action on Business Continuity Management, areas of concern, particularly in aspects related to HR management and assessments of business continuity process of vendors remained, it said.

Chinese assaults

Moreover, there have been rising concerns over the persistent Chinese assaults on Indian computer networks. Media reports over the last few years have documented how Chinese hackers are constantly scanning India’s official networks, a move that allows them to identify vulnerabilities and access content.

National Informatics Centre and several Indian embassies overseas have been targets of such attacks, in the past.

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