In order to fight cybercrime, the government on Thursday directed all companies and enterprises to mandatorily report cyber incidents to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).
The CERT-In will serve as the national agency in the area of cyber security under the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) said in a statement, adding that these directions will come under sub-section (6) of Section 70B of the IT Act, 2000 relating to information security practices, procedures, prevention, response.
“These directions will become effective after 60 days. These directions shall enhance overall cyber security and ensure safe and trusted Internet in the country,” it said. The development comes after various instances of cyber security incidents continue to be reported from time to time.
The functions include collection, analysis, and dissemination of information on cyber incidents; forecasts and alerts of cyber security incidents; emergency measures for handling cyber security incidents; coordination of cyber incident response activities; and issue guidelines, advisories, vulnerability notes, and whitepapers relating to information security practices, procedures, prevention, response and reporting of cyber incidents, the MeitY said.
“The directions cover aspects relating to synchronisation of ICT system clocks; mandatory reporting of cyber incidents to CERT-In; maintenance of logs of ICT systems; subscriber/customer registration details by data centres, virtual private server (VPS) providers, VPN service providers, cloud service providers; KYC norms and practices by virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers and custodian wallet providers,” it said.
CERT-In analyses cyber threats and handles cyber incidents tracked and reported to it. It also regularly issues advisories to organisations and users to enable them to protect their data and information and ICT infrastructure.
In order to coordinate response activities as well as emergency measures with respect to cyber security incidents, CERT-In calls for information from service providers, intermediaries, data centres and body corporate.
During the course of handling cyber incidents and interactions with the constituency, CERT-In has identified certain gaps that are causing hindrance in incident analysis. To address the identified gaps and issues so as to facilitate incident response measures, CERT-In has issued these directions, MeitY added.