Concerned over rising cyber attacks on the country’s critical communication infrastructure and leakage of classified information from sensitive departments, the Centre is mulling to launch One Time Password tokens for govt officials for secure authentication.
OTP tokens will be valid for one login session only, which will prevent cyber attacks and misuse of email accounts. At least 1,200 posts in the PMO, ministries and other departments are considered extra sensitive in nature.
The proposal envisaged under the Department of Electronics and Information Technology email services and usage policies says if necessary the use of OTP tokens for authentication will be made mandatory for all govt departments. The move is a bid to secure govt data and to ban commercial private email services following reports of Chinese hackers using malware to steal top secret documents stored on govt systems.