Kerala government to set up multi-crore security operations centre to combat cyber crime

In order to combat repeated cyber attacks on government websites over the past three years, the Kerala government has decided to set up a state-of-the-art Security Operations Centre (SOC). The SOC will be set up to design, build, implement, operate, manage and transfer of state-of-the-art enterprise cyber security operations for the government of Kerala.

As per a report of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 22,207 Indian websites, including 114 government portals were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) also reported that 74 and six government websites hosted on NICNET were hacked between January 2017 and February 2018.

Kerala State IT Mission has issued a tender notice inviting Expression of Interest (EOI) from leading, reputed and experienced System Integrators (SI)/ OEMs for setting up the SOC for Government of Kerala. This major cyber security project of the state government of Kerala is estimated to cost between Rs 5 to 7 crore.

“We are going for the SOC to protect the data in the servers and also prevent any further hacking of government websites. We need to have a well-defined security system to protect the data on the servers and the SOC will emerge as the core centre for protecting the same,” said Computer Emergency Response Team-Kerala (CERT-K) manager A Renjith.

“The SOC will be equipped to monitor and analyse activity on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, websites and other systems. It will look for anomalous activity that could be indicative of a security incident or compromise. It will act as a pre-emptive centre to resist a cyber-attack,” the officer said.