Govt officials asked not to click on suspicious websites

NEW DELHI: If you are working in a government office and a frequent internet user, you may need to be more cautious as the Centre has identified 96 such websites which are posing a great threat to cybersecurity.

According to sources, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has issued guidelines to every functional office not to click on doubtful websites as it may invite a cyber attack.

In the guidelines, it has been stated that since about 20 percent of government websites are at high risk, the users must not click ‘suspicious’ websites offering chances to win a costly phone, foreign tour package, etc.

“Clicking such websites means falling into the trap of hackers. It’s a kind of cyber attack that may take away all the data associated with any particular Internet Protocol (IP) address. The guidelines have been issued to aware employees of possible cyber threats,” the sources said.

Earlier in the day, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said that though digitisation has brought in exposure to the majority of the people, it has also exposed them to cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

“As part of its Digital India initiatives, the government has introduced a lot of its services online. Although this has made services very accessible to the citizens, it has also exposed them to the threats and vulnerabilities which are an inherent part of cyberspace,” the minister said at the inauguration of the “NIC-CERT”, a setup of NIC.

The minister said that in the recent past there had been an exponential growth in cyber attacks leading to concerns about data theft which led to the government drafting the Data Protection Act.

DIEGO MARADONA

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