In an effort to further streamline cyber security and measures against cyber crime, President Droupadi Murmu allocated responsibilities to three Ministries and the National Security Council Secretariat. Accordingly, the Cabinet Secretariat has notified changes in Allocation of Business Rules.

A notification, dated July 27, said that “matters relating to security of telecom networks” will come under the Department of Telecommunication. “Matters relating to cybersecurity as assigned in the Information Technology Act, 2000 and support to other Ministries/Departments on Cyber Security,” will be undertaken by Electronics & Information Technology Ministry (MeitY). Internal Security Department under the Home Ministry has been assigned “matters related to cyber crime”. The National Security Council Secretariat will provide “provide overall coordination and strategic direction for cyber security”.

Cyber Security

The issue of cyber security got much prominence on July 19 this year when a global outage was observed at around 9.40 am IST. Windows computers in various organisations showed error messages and stopped functioning. The stoppage of Windows systems was caused due to a software update provided on to a cyber threat detection solution provided by a cyber security partner company. This issue affected organisations and users globally including in India where services of airlines, manufacturing and IT sector were impacted for a few hours.

Keeping in mind the rapidly evolving nature of cyber security, the government has supported the development of solutions such as Meghdoot Cloud suite which is a comprehensive free and open-source cloud suite. Similarly, C-DAC has evolved a hardened variant of mobile operating system supporting specific commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) devices. This mobile operating system provides an enforcement of custom security policies at platform and kernel layers. At the same time CERT-In is designated as the national agency for responding to cyber security incidents. National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) implemented by the CERT-In serves as the control room to scan the cyberspace in the country and detect cyber security threats.

Rising crimes

As per the data published by the NCRB, cases registered under the cyber crime head (involving communication devices as medium/target) during the period from 2020 to 2022 rose to around 66,000 from around 50,000. The States/UTs are primarily responsible for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crimes including online transaction frauds and cyber crimes through their law enforcement agencies (LEAs).

The challenges of cyber space are many which flow from its vastness and borderless character. The Centre supplements the initiatives of the States/UTs through advisories and financial assistance under various schemes for capacity building of their LEAs. To strengthen the mechanism to deal with cyber crimes in a comprehensive and coordinated manner, the Centre has set up the ‘Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre’ (I4C).

Also, seven Joint Cyber Coordination Teams (JCCTs) have been constituted for Mewat, Jamtara, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Vishakhapatnam and Guwahati regions under I4C covering the whole country based upon cyber-crime hotspots/ areas having multi-jurisdictional issues by onboarding States/UTs to enhance the coordination framework among the LEAs of the States/UTs.