Uttarakhand CM reviews cybersecurity after cyberattack on data center

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami held a meeting on Saturday with various officials to assess the situation regarding the malware that temporarily closed down the state's data centre.

The Chief Minister directed the officials to complete the scanning of the State Data Centre as soon as possible and restart the sites of departments related to public interest on priority. He said that it should be ensured that all the sites start operating by Monday.

The meeting was attended by experts, the police department and senior officials of the State Data Center, State Wide Area Network (SWAN), National Informatics Centre (NIC), Information Technology Development Agency (ITDA) at the Chief Minister's residence on Saturday.

"Such cases should not be repeated, and a cyber security task force should be formed in the state as soon as possible for security related to online services. With the help of the best agencies of the Government of India working in the field of IT, the security system of the State Data Centre should be made more modern and the safety audit of the State Data Centre and online sites should also be done in the stipulated time," the Chief Minister said.

The Chief Minister further ordered that a disaster recovery centre should be established for the security of the online platform and recovery of online data related to various departments. He also said that the best practices of the states, central ministries and agencies doing the best work in cyber security should be studied and implemented in the state.

"The company doing technical work in ITDA should be reviewed again, if any negligence is found during the review, action should be taken against the company," the CM added.

The Chief Minister said that all the posts should be filled as soon as possible by holding a meeting under the chairmanship of the Chief Secretary for the deployment of personnel as per the requirement in ITDA. He also directed to provide cyber security training to employees and officers. The Chief Minister said that ITDA should ensure that the anti-virus system is updated in every government office, so that such incidents can be avoided. He said that work should be done in a planned manner to avoid such problems in the future.

"There has been no data loss due to malware on virtual machines in the ITDA data centre. Out of 1378 machines, 11 were affected by the malware. In the last 2 days, the data centre has been scanned several times. Other sites, including e-office and CM helpline Suchaaru, have started," Secretary Nitesh Jha said.

Chief Secretary Radha Raturi virtually attended the meeting. Additionally, Director General of Police Abhinav Kumar, Principal Secretary R.K. Sudhanshu, Secretary Meenakshi Sundaram, Secretary Shailesh Bagoli, Secretary Vinay Shankar Pandey, Kumaon Commissioner Deepak Rawat, Director General of Information Banshidhar Tiwari, Director ITDA Nitika Khandelwal, and other officials were present.