The Juniper team kicked things off by talking about Stuxnet. “This story, in essence, is about us. The Public sector holds the most valuable assets in the country. If it happened to Iran, it can happen to India too.”
Juniper posed a question to the delegates on the key threats being faced and, in turn, the key problems that it was trying to resolve. Threats today are quite advanced. Attacks are often state sponsored. The delegates agreed that cyber-crimes were only going to increase. The Juniper team suggested that the most critical data should not be kept on the Internet, but on standalone systems which are not accessible to outside applications. Access rights should be severely restricted. Having a policy around intranet use is vital.
Most attacks are due to the ignorance. The indigenization of equipment is important. Instead of indigenizing the whole device, the interface can be indigenized and encrypted. One of the concerns voiced was in terms of remote access from vendors who belong to countries that might pose a threat. The Juniper team suggested that, in such a case, a remote policy should be adhered to on the vendor side.
BYOD is on everyone’s mind and the delegates had concerns about working with different OSs. BYOD is likely to penetrate to the Panchayat level. E.g. The Kerala government will be providing a thousand netbooks to the administration to capture information in the field. Organizations can create ubiquitous applications that work with every OS. These devices can be given remote access and access rights can be defined properly.
Juniper works in the network and device domain. It has an ‘intrusion deception system’ or honey pot that leads a hacker to a false domain based on pattern recognition.
