GoI floats tenders for Rs 100 crore botnet cleaning and malware analysis centre

Soma Tah

BENGALURU, INDIA: The Government of India has floated tenders inviting technology and facilitation partners for Rs 100 crore botnet cleaning and malware analysis centre, in Delhi.

BJ Srinath, Director General, ICERT, Deity, confirmed the development to CIOL, on the sidelines of the 18th annual Karnataka ISACA conference organized by the Bangalore chapter, today.

"If all goes well, we will be ready with the pilot in October 2015,” asserted Srinath.

The center which will initially track the botnets in the PCs, will also expand its services to handheld and mobile devices in the near future, he said.

The announcement for RPF comes two months after the Deity announced its intent to set up a botnet cleaning and malware analysis center.

The center will automatically detect botnets that trigger various cybercrimes and help the owner to remove it from his device.

IT secretary R S Sharma said during the launch that the project is a part of Digital India program and aims to create safe and secure cyber space.

Srinath said, "We will take help of Internet service providers (ISP) to execute the project. The owner of infected device will get message from ISP about the infection. The person can remove it by downloading a solution from CERT website. The service will be free."

A botnet is a collection of compromised computers infected with malware that allows an attacker to control them.

According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), India was ranked second on a list of countries targeted the most by cyber criminals through social media last year, after the US. And, new research by F-Secure shows that India is at the top among Asian countries in terms of botnet-related malware.

In a report, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team said the total number of security-breach incidents, including phishing, virus/malicious code, network scanning/probing, spam and spread of malware through website compromise, was 8,311 in January this year, against 5,987 in November 2014. Also, 2,224 Indian websites were defaced in January, compared with 1,256 in November 2014.