MeitY plans extensive cybersecurity workshops for key government department heads

The workshop by the IT ministry comes following a crippling cyberattack on the servers of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Safdarjung Hospital and other hospitals in the capital city.

The website of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) was also attacked 6,000 times in a day, according to reports.

These workshops, to be conducted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) from December 19, will cover aspects such as darknet and dark web, D-DOS attack and service disruption, advanced persistent threats, and common attack techniques adopted by cybercriminals.
The training will be directed at chief information officers, chief technical officers, and members of the information technology and project management units (PMU) of these organisations.

“The recent attacks on government assets have reinforced the focus on cybersecurity. The idea is to build awareness and create an ecosystem where government departments can borrow learnings from each other to build resilient IT systems in their respective departments,” a ministry official said.

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ET has seen a copy of the training schedule prepared by the IT ministry.

In the 5-day workshop being conducted by the IT ministry’s National e-governance division under its ‘Cyber Surakshit Bharat’ initiative, CIOs, CTOs and IT team members of government departments, as well as PSUs, will also be trained on aspects of identifying threats before they hit the network, ways to determine the credibility of threat or ransom being demanded by cybercriminals and efficient ways of handling them.

Cyberattacks on government departments such as health, science and technology, nuclear power plants and the armed forces have increased exponentially following the easing of Covid-19 lockdowns in 2021. The IT ministry had then also sent an exhaustive list of dos and don’ts to all government departments.

Data from cybersecurity from CloudSEK reveals that the number of cyberattacks against the healthcare industry globally increased 95.34% in the first four months of 2022 compared with a year earlier.

The report said India saw the second-highest number of attacks worldwide, with a total of 7.7% of the total attacks on the healthcare industry in 2021. India accounted for 29.7% of all attacks in the Asia and Pacific region while China was the second most targeted country in the region.