CWG ticketing system faced 8,000 cyber attacks

NEW DELHI, INDIA: There were over 8,000 cyber attacks on the Commonwealth Games' ticketing and scoring systems in October last year but these were repelled, National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon said here on Thursday while underlining the need to strengthen cyber security.

"There were 8,000 attacks on the ticketing, timing and scoring systems and we managed to tackle them all," Menon said at the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture here.

Menon was responding to a question on how India was preparing for the cyber warfare as its websites and networks were frequently under attacks from hackers, including the Chinese.

"Websites are meant to be hit. You want the world to see them and if they hit it and deface them, it shows them in poor light and not us," he said to queries about websites being hacked by the cyber pirates.

Menon, a former foreign secretary, underlined that the key issue before the government was to maintain the security of critical data and networks where information is stored.

He said it was "very hard" to deal with the issue in the old way of investigating, and called for strengthening capabilities to deal with the menace.

He added that internationally, the laws were not defined to tackle the issue as "it is still not clear whether the attacks on US networks is considered to be an international crime".

Menon's remarks come against the backdrop of repeated cyber attacks on the National Informatics Centre (NIC), backbone of the government's IT network, by Chinese hackers.

Menon identified cyber security as an important area in which India needs to invest in days to come.

In the past, websites of the Indian Army, the Prime Minister's Office, even NIC's own website has been attacked by hackers.