Bharat SainiLast Updated on February 27, 2017 by Bharat Saini
CERT-In, Computer Emergency Response Team of the government, as a major cyber security initiative of Digital India, has soft launched on the 20th of December, 2016, its botnet centre to help citizens disinfect their devices to protect them online. The botnet is a programme aimed at automatically disinfecting computers and mobiles from viruses and malicious software for free. The new system will do away need of installing anti-virus software in PC and mobile phones. CERT will start informing internet service providers (ISPs) about infected systems. They will have to synchronise their system to meet the requirement of Botnet and malware cleaning centre. ISPs will then alert their customers about infection in their PC or mobile and recommend them downloading of software from website of botnet centre to remove malwares.
A botnet is a network of malicious software that can steal information, take control of device function and carry out cyber attacks like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) that prevent access of websites. A number of Internet-connected computers autonomously communicating with other similar machines in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by command and control (C&C) or by passing messages to one another. C&C might be built into the botnet as P2P (Peer to Peer). The botnets have been used many times to send spam email or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks.
CERT-In was created by the Indian Department of Information Technology in 2004 and operates under the auspices of that department. According to the provisions of the Information Technology Amendment Act 2008, CERT-In is responsible for overseeing administration of the Act. CERT-In is the nodal agency responsible for dealing with cyber security threats that keeps tabs on cyber attacks and has been working since last year on setting up the
Rs. 100 crore malware and botnet cleaning centre.
CERT-In has signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) with counterpart/similar organizations in about eight countries that include U. K., Korea, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Uzbekistan. Ministry of External Affairs has also signed MoU with Cyber Security as one of the areas of cooperation with Shanghai Cooperation Organization. With the MoUs, participating countries can exchange technical information on Cyber attacks, response to cyber security incidents and find solutions to counter the cyber attacks. They can also exchange information on prevalent cyber security policies and best practices. The MoUs helps to strengthen cyber space of signing countries, capacity building and improving relationship between them.
In the wake of demonetisation government’s push for digital transactions has raised the issue of cyber-security as well as better education about possible threats in this regard. Concerns over cyber-security have taken centre stage in India in the past three weeks ever since a hacker group identified as ‘Legion’ compromised the emails and twitter accounts of political leaders, journalists and other individuals.
CERT-In has identified that skimming and malware were the two most common threats to transactions carried out at point of-sale terminals, which are increasingly being used at retail outlets to accept payments.
The botnet centre will have development arrangements with antivirus vendors and the users choosing to remove the malware will be directed to the CERT-In website, which will let them select the tool they want to clean up their system with.
CERT-In can identify which IP addresses are infected, because they are shooting out spam or bots and can inform the ISP about the infected address. The ISP knows who this particular address belongs to, and it can help notify the users and ask them to clean their device – whether laptops, desktops or mobile devices.
The botnet centre will alert people that their system is compromised and they can go to the botnet site, download antivirus and clean their devices. The success of the programme will depend on cooperation among all parties involved.
