DailyPost 2968
CRUCIAL DEFENCE UNIT UNDER RANSOMWARE ATTACK
We keep speculating about the state of cyber security in India given the fact that barely anything authenticated or validated comes out in the public domain either vetted by the government or the organisation(s) in question. There is still no legally mandated standardised breach reporting system in India. The data protection act, though enacted with immense delay, is still meandering because of the rules not being put in place. The whole cyber security / cyber crime apparatus, ecosystem and the stakeholders seem to be fully busy with digital arrest, investment scam and stock market related app scams.
These do grab the headlines and are important at an individual level, but the actual action is somewhere else. If you don’t get a grip over that action, the rest of the talk is futile. You don’t even remain in the catching up race. In this context the DoPT Report 2023-24 has done a yeoman’s service at least in delineating facts on cyber security as it unfolded in the year in question, at least on the reported ones. As per this report which was published last week a crucial defence unit was affected by ransomware attack in the year 2023.
The report interestingly does not specify the location of the critical defence unit that was hit by ransomware. Timelessness and confidentiality for no reason marks our sarkari establishment. Thus we remain where we are oblivious of the world around us, with the cyber security scenario is changing at a breathtaking pace. The report makes it known that the CBI in the said period investigated complex cyber crime and besides the above mentioned defence unit it investigated a data breach impacting millions of Indian users, a malware attack in a Ministry and a massive DDOS attack on critical infrastructure and airports in India.
Suffice to say all such incidents are kept under wraps. The information that is being released through this report does not serve any professional / operational or even reactive purpose, this at best has an ornamental value. All this happened when India hosted the G-20 conference the same year. In October 2023 American Resecurity issued an alert that ICMR had suffered a data leak of Aadhar and passport information of 81 crore Indians, along with their phone numbers, and addresses. Is this the privacy regime are we heading to? The 2023 annual report of CERT-In shows 15,92,917 security incidents as against 53,117 in 2017. Have we any real clue of what is happening and what is our plan ahead?
WE ARE CAUGHT IN OUR OWN CYBER SECURITY VORTEX OF IGNORANCE, CONFIDENTIALITY, LACK OF INVESTIGATIVE CAPABILITY AND LEGAL LACUNAE.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.