Data leaks prompt Andhra Pradesh to order an audit of all government websites

Former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has decided to give the event a skip. Naidu also declined invitation to Jagan Mohan Reddy's swearing-in ceremony.

The Andhra Pradesh government has ordered an immediate audit of all 1200 websites belonging to different government departments. This comes right after recent reports of sensitive data being freely available of people who bought medicines from the state-run medicine store, Anna Sanjivini.

As per a report by The New Indian Express, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has directed the IT department to ensure that all the government-linked websites are audited for breach of data leading to privacy issues. The report quotes the Principal Secretary of IT, K Vijayanand as saying, “We have asked the Andhra Pradesh State Cyber Security Operations Centre (APCSOC) to conduct an audit of all the departments' websites to identify if any sensitive public data is available on them. Here on, we will audit all the portals for both cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy issues. The audits will be done on a monthly basis.”

The IT department had already audited around 320 government website for vulnerabilities in May. The report also quoted some anonymous senior officials who claimed that auditing government portals was a bitter experience for them since some babus were apprehensive of allowing another department to access their department’s data. Despite being a government department, the APCSOC had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to be able to conduct the audit.

Mr Vijayanand asserted that this time the APSOC officials will not face this problem. He said, “We are going to give [AP]SOC access to all the servers. Therefore, the SOC officials need not visit offices of the various departments anymore, and can monitor and take corrective steps from the [AP]SOC itself.”