To avoid cyber attacks, organisations should be alert and have updated practices to tackle such incidents : Anil Sagar, Director (Scientist F), CERT-In

CERT-In is the national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents as and when they occur. The constituency of CERT-In is the Indian Cyber Community. It was established with the purpose of reporting on vulnerabilities and promoting effective IT security practices all throughout the country.

Anil Sagar, Director (Scientist F), CERT-In, Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India is one of the top most headman in the area of IT security in India. 

Here, Anil shares his views in the area of cybersecurity and OT (Operational Technology) vulnerabilities within the industry . 

Talking about the challenges in security, Anil Sagar said, “Some of the challenges that we face in our country with respect to securing our system would be; organisations are not maintaining the logs properly, devices need to be configured properly and having a centralised logging system. So, whenever an attack or breach happens in your system and environment, one can go back and trace back what had happened and how it happened because one needs to analyse the attack. And, there should be adequate visibility in your network, so that whenever an attack happens in your network then you are able to detect the attack or breach in a very timely manner and look for ways to quarantine it immediately. Otherwise, one will not get to know about what had actually happened to their network, probably after weeks or some months have gone by.”

“As, some of the attacks which had happened in one’s system would have happened when their system was interacting with other adversaries, so one needs to check up on these and have their processes in place accordingly. And, some of the other attacks that we are facing nowadays are ransomware attacks. This kind of attack, some years back they used to target only some vulnerabilities or specific organisations, but now they are quite notorious in nature and are able to target almost any organisation or individual. So, to avoid such incidents one should keep their feet on the ground; have the best and updated practices in their organisation to tackle such incidents and have trusted backups,” Anil commented. 

He further added by saying, “As far as CERT is concerned, one of the initiatives CERT is setting up is a project called National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) to generate necessary situational awareness of existing and potential cyber security threats and enable timely information sharing for protective actions by individual entities.”    

When talking about OT security, Anil said, “We are working for OT security as well. In that area, we have partnered with various reputed institutions for training in OT platform and also ended up sending some key officials from our organisations to train them on the same. Also, some of the  OT devices are very crucial in running some very critical operations. And there is a need to ensure that proper monitoring is happening within the organisations for the system and networks. Just as we have IT SOCs (Security Operation Centres), in the similar manner we need to have OT SOCs as well. OT SOCs are slightly complicated to establish as they require specialised technologies, so one needs to be in touch with the specialised OEMs who cater to the demand of creating  customised OT SOCs.”