MC India Web 3.0: India among most cyber-attacked nations, needs centralised cyber security body, says former cybersecurity coordinator

India is among the most cyber-attacked nations in the world and urgently needs a centralised National Cyber Security Organisation to safeguard its digital ecosystem, Rajesh Pant, Chairman of the Cyber Security Association of India and Chairman of the India Future Foundation, said.

Pant stressed that cyberspace has effectively become the fifth domain of warfare – alongside land, air, sea, and space – and India must designate a single accountable authority for its defence.

Speaking at the India Web 3.0 ‘Paving the Road to a Decentralised Future’ event organised by Moneycontrol, Pant said cybercrime has emerged as one of the world’s biggest economic risks.
“The World Economic Forum is consistently saying that cyber crime is the biggest man-made risk to the economic progress of nations. They've pegged the global cost of cyberfrauds at USD 10.5 trillion,” Pant said.

He attributed the surge in cyber incidents to a combination of factors – geopolitical turbulence, absence of global cyber laws, and the inability to trace attack origins due to multi-hop routing.

New cyber strategy

Pant highlighted that India’s ranking in the Global Cyber Security Index of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) improved from 47th to 10th earlier, and the country now figures in the “topmost category” globally.

Despite that, Pant called for an overhaul of India’s cyber security policy framework, noting that the existing National Cyber Security Policy of 2013 no longer addresses the realities of the digital age.

He noted that India’s vast digital footprint – with around 900 million Internet users and 1.3 billion mobile phones – makes it a major target for global hackers.

“We need a National Cyber Security Strategy, because our existing policy is from 2013 and a lot of things have changed. There was no crypto. Now new-age crimes have come up,” he said.

He emphasised that India must establish a National Cyber Security Organisation, a centralised body responsible for safeguarding national cyberspace and ensuring inter-agency coordination.

“All the major developed countries have created a centralised organisation responsible for protection of cyberspace – Israel has a National Cyber Security Directorate, Singapore a cyber security agency, China a cyber space organisation, and the UK a National Cyber Security Centre. That is what we need,” Pant said.

DPDP Act rules

Pant also said that the government is expected to release the rules under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 before the winter session of Parliament, paving the way for the new data protection framework to take effect.

“The rules for the DPDP Act should come out before the winter session of Parliament,” he said, expressing hope that privacy and data protection mechanisms would be strengthened thereafter.