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Cyber Security Challenges are Real, Alarming - India's Top Telecom Official

At a time when the political discourse in India has been rocked by recent revelations of Cambridge Analytica using Facebook accounts for political campaigns for more than one party, a top bureaucrat has revealed that the Narendra Modi-led government is putting in place a comprehensive data protection framework.
Sputnik

New Delhi (Moscow) — India's Telecom Secretary, Aruna Sundararajan has acknowledged that cybersecurity threats have indeed risen exponentially in the recent past, especially for countries like India where digitization is fast becoming a way of life. Sundararajan, who recently outlined India's cybersecurity plans at the World Summit on Information Society in Geneva, expressed her concerns in a series of tweets.

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"Every nation faces cybersecurity challenges. Countries like India, where digitization growth has been exponential, the magnitude and complexity of these challenges become multi-fold. For example, 300 million Indians adopted digital payments in just 6 months," Sundararajan tweeted.

​In her speech in Geneva, Sundararajan said the country was working on installing sectoral Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) to ensure that all layers of digital access are appropriately secured. 

​The government of India has a flagship program called Digital India which has a vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. The program got a boost with the mass migration of users from a cash economy to the cashless digital economy when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the de-monetization of high-value currency notes in November 2016.

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