THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The state government’s ambitious cyberdome project, which Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala had said would start functioning in October, is likely to be delayed further.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, the Home Minister had said in the aftermath of the alleged hacking of the state government’s website that the government was firm on averting similar incidents in the future by implementing the cyberdome project.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the preliminary work on setting up the facility at Technopark here has been moving at a snail’s pace. And sources said the commencement of cyberdome operations will be delayed as many works, including the availability of human resources and providing connectivity need to be completed.
Even as Technopark authorities allocated 1,500 sq ft for setting up the facility a year ago in Thejaswini building, the fund for the same--it will be set up at a cost of `2 crore-- was released only 15 days ago.
Cyberdome nodal officer Manoj Abraham, while conceding that the project had indeed failed to meet the original deadline, told Express that the inordinate delay in the release of the funds had led to a few uncertainties. Moreover, he said he was not in a position to announce a date by which the project would take off.
“Though, we can’t give you a date for the formal inauguration, we hope to start the operations as soon as possible. We need to finish some works on incorporating the connectivity and bringing the systems. However, the ‘online office’ has already started with a team of experts.
Besides, we are in talks with some of the companies to associate with us to prevent any such cyber attacks on government websites in the future”, he said.
Although, the officials associated with cyberdome had gone on the record stating that the first phase of the project would focus on anti-piracy and social media monitoring, it appears that the state police have given least priority to the hacking of government websites.
Over the past five months, some 30 government websites had been hacked, which were subsequently restored with assistance from C-DIT and state IT Mission.