The Ministry of Home Affairs is looking to hire 60-odd experts on the issue. (File photo)
Regular cyber threats to government data has pushed the Ministry of Home Affairs to go on a hiring spree. The Home Ministry is on a look out for cyber experts who can safeguard data assets of the government.
The finance division of the ministry is vetting a proposal through which it is all set to hire 60-odd experts.
"The proposal is to hire a company who would have these experts," he added.
According to him, request for the proposal is being scrutinised by the finance wing of the ministry. "Details like what type of services we need is being worked out," he added.
The team of experts would keep an eye on traffic on various government sites. "Our experience shows that there has been a pattern to hacking. Before the hacking takes place, traffic on the particular site always increases. These experts will keep an eye on this aspect apart from other surveillance," a senior ministry official told NDTV.
The selected team would work on cloud-based security solutions. In simple words, they will provide a remote approach to detecting and mitigating security threats.
"Like organisations deploy third-party cloud-based security software between remote users and their systems, these cloud-based security providers would examine network traffic for known attack patterns and pass only legitimate traffic through to users," explains an officer who is dealing with this project.
A lot of government data is stored in cloud. "Solution to stop attacks in the cloud before they reach the target agency's data centre or applications would be an area where the focus would be," adds the officer.
The second focus of this expert group would be on data breach.
Data breaches may involve many kinds of information - financial records, credit card details or corporate intellectual property.
Crime and Criminal Tracking Network or CCTNS and National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) are two projects which the government is focusing on.
CCTNS is a nationwide online tracking system in which the data of more than 14,000 police stations is integrated. On the other hand, NATGRID is the integrated intelligence grid connecting databases of core security agencies of the Government of India to collect comprehensive patterns of intelligence that can be readily accessed by intelligence agencies.
This is for the first time such experts are being hired by MHA to protect their data.
Interestingly, the parliament was last week informed that over 22,000 Indian websites, including 114 government portals, were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018.