CERT-IN to oversee cyber security
By siliconindia staff writer   |   Tuesday, 20 January 2004, 20:30 IST   |    1 Comments
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NEW DELHI: The minister for information technology, Arun Shourie today formally inaugurated the Computer Emergency Response Team-India (CERT-IN), a group of experts to oversee cyber security in the country which has been functioning for sometime now. He also opened a state-of-the-art security network operations centre (S-NOC) for the CERT-IN access to which is controlled by biometric systems, with the entire area under CCTV surveillance. CERT-IN is expected to serve as a central point to respond to computer security incidents, facilitate communication among experts working to solve computer emergencies, and establish international linkages in the area. The increasing use of the Net and the fact that it is the link for e-commerce, e-governance, and online information access has alerted the government to the danger of website attacks. “If certain sensitive points in our power supply systems, railway signalling systems, stock markets are punctured, it would lead to a total breakdown in services. The impact on civilian society can be disastrous with the enemy taking advantage,” pointed out Shourie. The Deputy Prime Minister, L K Advani had sent in a congratulatory message on the occasion which was read out by Shourie. Operating under the DIT, CERT-IN is developing security guidelines for operating systems, web servers, mail servers, firewalls, intrusion detection systems as well as advisories, alerts, vulnerability and incident notes, based on world-wide practices. With a mirror-site funded by DIT, set up at the IISc, Bangalore where R&D activities in related areas is on. A visit to reveals that the CERT-IN team is already working and has put up lots of information that would be of use to system administrators and the cyber community as a whole. Several incident response teams with expertise in major hardware and software platforms like Windows, Sun Solaris, Unix, Linux, web servers such as IIS, iPlanet, Apache; mail servers, data base management systems such as Oracle, SQL server, network devices such as firewalls, IDS, routers and so on have been created in the office of CERT-IN. All security-related threats including compromise of restricted confidential service accounts or software installations, denial-of-service attacks, large-scale hacking incidents, forgery and so on can be reported to this team through email, fax, telephone and web. The CERT-IN site quotes a recent survey of over 1,000 companies across Asia -Pacific by IDC. It reveals that 72% of the enterprises have experienced an Internet security breach while 39% felt their online threats have increased in the past year. It has forecast that the amount of information transmitted globally over the Net will double each year over the next five years. In 2002, the traffic volume was 180 petabits per day (one petabit=1 million gigabits) This will increase to 5,175 petabits per day by 2007. Such an enormous increase in Net traffic would bring in a proportional increase in security issues too. (Source: ET)

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