Startups to help NIC in securing its 10,000 websites, apps, portals and APIs

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Around 10,000 websites, applications and APIs handled by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) will be put through rigorous security checks to ascertain their capability of withstanding cyber attacks.

The NIC in a request for proposal said that a maximum of five startups will be conducting security audits at four national data centres, located in New Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Bhubaneshwar -- which currently hosts the around 10,000 portals, websites, applications and APIs for the government.

Currently, these services are being undertaken by in-house professionals of the NIC. "Considering the magnitude of work, this specialised group needs the services of organisastions who can manage end-to-end security for these web applications/APIs," the RFP said.

Apart from that, these security audits will also be taken out at Regional Centre of Excellence AppSec Centres at Lucknow, Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram, and at 29 NIC mini-data centres at capitals of States and Union Territories.

While reasoning the need for such security audits, the NIC admitted that there are possibilities of cyber attack on these websites and applications because of "flaws in the design, development and deployment of application software."

These portals, websites, applications or APIs, which cater to government departments or ministries are developed or managed in-house by the NIC or are developed by the department themselves, the RFP said.

"The vulnerabilities thus created may be exploited by intruders with malicious intent to cause defacements, data corruption, data/information leakage and disruption in service continuity etc," it added.

Moneycontrol has reached out to the NIC with further queries regarding this, and the article will be updated when a response is received.