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India steadily grows reputation in cyber security

Siddharth Srivastava

India appears poised to become a major player in the field of cyber security because of a concerted drive by the government and an improving international reputation.

The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2017 encouraged cyber security cooperation between the Pentagon and India’s Ministry of Defense. That followed a June 2017 report by the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (TCU), which ranked India 23rd among 165 countries included in the 2017 cyber security index. That put India one notch above Germany and nine above China.

Looking to the future of the partnership between India and the U.S., the “committee encourages the [Defense] Department to work closely with India in the cyber domain,” the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee said in its report on the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, “at appropriate strategic, operational, and tactical levels.”

India’s cyber security industry has been making a concerted push to become a global player with a goal of growing the industry by U.S. $35 billion by 2025, reported the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), an industry policy group. As part of this effort, DSCI has fostered the development of cyber security startups in the past two years. These involve government-supported research and development projects covering cryptography and cryptanalysis, steganography, network and systems security assurance, network monitoring, cyber forensics and capacity development.

Sachin Shridhar, co-founder of Lucideus, a leading Indian cyber security firm, told FORUM that India has reached “middling levels” of guarding its cyberspace due to growing awareness of the need to protect the online domain. “There is plenty to still learn from advanced countries such as USA that are far ahead of us in building firewalls against malware and increasingly ransomware attacks.”

Cyber security cooperation between India and the U.S. began in 2001 with the establishment of the India-U.S. Cyber Security Forum and was enhanced in 2011 when New Delhi and Washington signed a memorandum of understanding to promote increased cooperation and exchange information on cyber security.  A round of dialogues followed with the most recent occurring in New Delhi in September 2016. It covered deepening bilateral cooperation and strengthening of the U.S.-India strategic partnership. A sixth round of talks has been planned for 2017.

India currently has agreements with the U.S., Japan and South Korea to share cyber security assets across borders. India has undertaken a host of measures to beef up its cyber security capabilities, including implementation of a standardized policy within government agencies and by conducting cyber security drills to assess preparedness.

The main government agency dealing with cyber security in India is the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), a department of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, responsible for implementing a national cyber security strategy.

“As a means to measure cyber security development,” reads TCU’s report, “CERT-IN security auditors have been empaneled to conduct security audits including vulnerability assessment, penetration testing of computer systems and networks of various organizations of the government, critical infrastructure organizations and those in other sectors of the Indian economy.”

Siddharth Srivastava is a FORUM contributor reporting from New Delhi, India.

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