53,000 cybersecurity incidents observed during 2017: Ravi Shankar Prasad

CERT-In issues alerts and advisories regarding latest cyber threats/vulnerabilities and counter measures to protect computers on regular basis, says IT minister

Over 53,000 cyber security incidents, including phishing, website intrusions and defacements and ransomware were observed in 2017, Parliament today said.

"As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total number of 49,455, 50,362 and 53,081 cyber security incidents were observed during the year 2015, 2016 and 2017, respectively," IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha today.

He added that the types of incidents include phishing, scanning/probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus/malicious code, ransomware and denial of service attacks.

The minister pointed out that CERT-In issues alerts and advisories regarding latest cyber threats/vulnerabilities and countermeasures to protect computers on regular basis.

Also, tailored alerts are sent to key organisations to enable them to detect and prevent cyber attacks, he said.

The government has initiated setting up of National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) in CERT-In to generate necessary situational awareness of existing and potential cyber security threats and enable timely information sharing for proactive, preventive and protective actions by individual entities, Prasad said adding that phase I of NCCC has been made operational.

In response to a separate question, Prasad said some instances of use of social media being misused for posting objectionable contents, defame public personalities and to spread terror propaganda have come to the notice of the government.

"The Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 has provisions for removal of objectionable online content," he said.

Prasad said the IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2011 under section 79 of the IT Act requires that intermediaries observe due diligence while discharging their duties and inform users of computer resources not to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, update or share any information that is harmful, objectionable, affect minors and unlawful in any way.

Besides, the government takes action under section 69A of IT Act for blocking of websites/webpages with objectionable contents, whenever requests are received from designated nodal officers or upon Court orders.

To another query, Prasad said CERT-In has entered into Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with its overseas counterpart agencies - CERTs of the US, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Bangladesh for information exchange and collaboration for cyber security incident response.