New Delhi: Identification of criminals behind cyber attacks on government bodies is becoming a tough nut for it to crack.
The attacks used to transmit classified information to overseas servers are being found as “structured” and “complex” by the authorities. Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth wrote to top bureaucrats of all government departments, last Thursday, to strictly comply with cyber security policy at offices.
He said, “It may be noted that due to complexities of the cyber domain, it has been difficult to identify the exact beneficiaries of these attacks.”
He warned the officials that the country's cyber space is witnessing an increase in “structured attacks” citing cyber spying as the main reason behind it. He said that most computers were found to have transmitted “classified information to transit servers placed outside the country”.
He refrained from quoting any country's name for the occurrence.
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Seth held that one of the main reasons of such proliferation of data is non-adherence of cyber security policy by the officers due to which safeguard measures stand ineffective.
This, he said, was evident from the modus operandi of the attacks where “alluring mails” with attachments or links are sent to officers and on opening the same malicious software gets executed and makes systems vulnerable to external proliferation.
Quoting another example, he said that sometimes malwares get transferred through the use of unauthorized external memory storage devices also like pen drives and compromises the computer which further infects other systems on the network too.
Through the note, all department heads have been notified to ensure “strict compliance” of security instructions provided under National Information Security Policy and Guidelines by the Ministry of Home Affairs and Cyber Security Policies issued by Department of Information Technology.
Reportedly, according to a report of Computer Emergency Response Team-India of 2014, cyber attacks on India have increased from 13,000 in 2011 to 62,000 till mid-2014 and most of them have been seen originating from cyber space of countries like US, Europe, Brazil, Turkey, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria and the UAE.
