THURSDAY, MAY 09, 2024
PANJIM: Reacting to reports on massive data leak of personal details of over 815 million Indians on the dark web, Goa’s IT professionals have called for adequate security guards to prevent such incidents from occurring in future.
Goa Technology Association founder president Mangirish Salelkar said, “This incident is not the first security breach faced by a major medical institution in India. Earlier in the year, cyber criminals infiltrated AIIMS’ servers, gaining control of over 1TB (terabyte) of data, and subsequently demanding a substantial ransom. This incident led the hospital to resort to manual record-keeping for 15 days, causing delays in an already overwhelmed institute.”
“The data has to be encoded before it goes into the databases. There has to be a secured crypting format. You have to make sure that the firewall of the system is secure. There has to be a robust password policy in which every user in the system has to change the password every three months,” Salelkar said.
IT professional Yash Ganthe said, “There has to be a proper technical security guard rails. Access should be prevented. It’s an elaborate topic. Security experts should be brought in for that.”
“Changing passwords by an individual will not help because the data is with an institution,” Ganthe said.
Another IT professional Prajyot Mainkar said, “There has to be some action from the end-users. We need to be careful about the personal details. We are in a year where scamming is part of life. Scamming can be brought to the notice but prevention is always required. Here people came to know and report but there are so many cases which probably go unnoticed. You cannot achieve 100 percent security.”
In 2023, from the end-users perspective, people need to be more secure. The password not only needs to be changed frequently but also it should have a combination of special characters, numerical, etc.”
Mainkar said, “We receive OTPs these days but we do not know who is asking for the OTP. I think this is a very sophisticated era today. There is a lot of data and that needs to be secured. One must need to think where the passwords are secured, what are the passwords, etc. People use apps and later uninstall them without deleting their account. Once you delete an app it goes from your system but it remains with the app company. If data of that company is compromised then automatically your data too gets compromised,” he said.
Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) IT Committee chairman Milind Prabhu said, “'It’s a huge breach and its national security concern. Now when these threats have been received then it must be taken seriously. The ministry concerned has to act on this.”
Gurudas Kamat said, “When you are online, you are not secure anymore. Just you put a barrier as much as possible. In hacking, your program is overturned by their program. There are some good hackers also, who are engaged in counter-attacking.”
