By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, MAR 21, 2015: AS per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) a total number of 21699, 27605, 28481 & 32323 websites were hacked by various hacker groups spread across the world during the year 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. These also include a total number of 308, 371, 189 and 155 Government websites hosted under ‘gov.in' & ‘nic.in' domains during the year 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

The comprehensive measures taken by Government to tackle the problem include:

All Central Government Ministries / Departments and State / Union Territory Governments have been advised to conduct security auditing of entire Information Technology infrastructure. All the new government websites and applications are to be audited with respect to cyber security prior to their hosting. The auditing of the websites and applications is to be conducted on a regular basis after hosting also. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) provides necessary expertise to audit IT infrastructure of critical and other ICT sectors.

It has been mandated that all government websites are to be hosted on infrastructure of National Informatics Centre (NIC), Education and Research Network (ERNET) or any other secure infrastructure service provider in the country.

National Informatics Centre (NIC) which hosts the government websites is continuously engaged in upgrading and improving the security posture of its hosting infrastructure.

National Informatics Centre (NIC) has been directed not to host web sites, which are not audited with respect to cyber security.

All major websites are being monitored regularly to detect malicious activities.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issues alerts and advisories regarding latest cyber threats and countermeasures on regular basis. CERT-In has published guidelines for securing the websites, which are available on its website (www.cert-in.org.in). CERT-In also conducts regular training programmes to make the system administrators aware about secure hosting of the websites.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) tracks the hacking of websites on 24x7 basis and alerts the concerned website owners to restore the hacked websites and taking further actions to secure the websites.

This information was given in a written reply today by the Minister for Communication & Information Technology Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad in Rajya Sabha yesterday.