Sh. Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology held a meeting with officers of the Department of Information Technology, the Ministry of Home Affairs, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), National Informatics Centre, CBI, and others in the wake of attack on the CBI website. The meeting was held to review the measures needed to enhance the security of the websites in particular and cyber space in general. The Minister observed that there has been a quantum jump in the number of Indian Websites from 1.7 lakh websites in 2005 to about 1 crore websites now. This has necessitated that the Ministries, Departments and the Public Sector Enterprises at both Central and State Government levels pay close attention to cyber security guidelines.
The Crisis Management Plan Prescribed by Indian Computer Emergency Response (CERT-In) is a comprehensive set of instructions to prevent and deal with attacks on websites. Towards this end, it has been decided that all websites of the Ministries and the Departments should be audited with respect to quality and security prior to the hosting.
With respect to design and security of the websites, Shri pilot said that the Guidelines issued by National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Web Security Guidelines should be complied with by all Ministries and Departments. CERT-In has empanelled more than 50 IT Security Auditors for auditing IT infrastructure of the organizations. The Ministries and Departments have also been instructed to audit their websites on regular basis, and whenever there are any major changes in the website applications. NIC has been instructed to host websites only after the user Department produces security certification of their websites and compliance to the guidelines periodically.
