Hyderabad: The Telangana Information Technology department is seeking as many as 200 ‘cyber warriors’ to deal with cyber security issues for the government and private sectors. Under its upcoming Cyber Security Policy 2016, the IT department plans to equip professionals with cyber security skills and knowledge to establish a pool of cyber experts.
The IT department will provide training to the selected cyber warriors and issue them certificates. Of these 200, the government will task at least 10 per cent with protecting its databases, websites and systems apart from building powerful firewalls along with monitoring and maintenance, to guard against attacks.
As the government is planning to bring all the departments online to provide its services through websites and payment gateways, officials from the IT department have been holding a series of reviews and meetings with ethical hackers, payment gateways and cards like Visa, Mastercard and Maestro on the matter.
IT secretary Jayesh Ranjan told this newspaper that the state government would create a state-run Computer Emergency Response Team for fighting cyber criminals. “Cyber attacks are increasing year on year. The threat to private firms than government organisations is 10 times greater. Mostly, the services of cyber warriors are required for medium and big IT firms.The pool of cyber warriors will plug loopholes in cyber security,” he said.
Another official said that the state CERT would act like the Centre's unit. “The number of cyber crimes has doubled in the last five years. Hyderabad is home to the top five technology firms in the world in terms of IT exports and contributions. The threat of cyber attacks is high,” the source said.
Experts can work from afar, too
Creating a Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is a challenging task due to lack of experts in cyber security. All 1,283 medium and big IT firms have at least one ethical hacker. Others have freelancers.
Freelance web developer R. Shyam Kumar said “Though many companies have them, they need more every time.” Telangana IT Association founder president Sundeep Kumar Mak-thala said recruiting cyber warriors might be a problem but creating a pool of cyber warriors would not be a big task. “A cyber warrior can work from anywhere. We can avai their services from anywhere,” he said.
