The government has said that in the past there have been attempts to attack cyber cyber networks operating in Government which had their origin in China and some other countries.

“These attacks have been observed to be originating from the cyber space of a number of countries including China”, said Milind Deora, Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology in the Lok Sabha.

He said that agencies have detected that the attackers are compromising computer systems located in different parts of the World and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual system from which the attacks are being launched. Hence, it is difficult to attribute cyber attack to a particular country.

He said that a sophisticated virus called as “Stuxnet” was reported to be spreading worldwide since July 2010. The virus targets Industrial Control Systems.

In views of these attacks alerts and advisories about the Stuxnet threat were issued on website of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). Measures to be taken to detect infected systems, dis-infect the same and prevent further propagation were advised to all critical sector organizations in the country.

Apart from this, the government in association with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and security vendors tracked the infected systems and advised the owners of the systems to dis-infect the same. Workshops were conducted by CERT-In and other government agencies jointly for critical sector organizations to create awareness and suggest steps to be taken to counter the threat.

“Department of Information Technology and Electronics has circulated Computer Security Guidelines and Cyber Security Policy to all the Ministries/ Departments on taking steps to prevent, detect and mitigate cyber attacks”, Deora said.
 
All Central Government Ministries/ Departments and State/Union Territory Governments have been advised to conduct security audit of entire Information Technology Infrastructure, including websites, periodically to discover gaps with respect to security practices and take appropriate corrective actions.

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