THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With its security experts sounding the alarm, the country's space agency has beefed up its armour-plating against threats lurking in cyberland. Employees of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) can no longer access officer e-mails from their homes or mobile phones as the space agency has been warned that the practice posed a major security threat.
Simply put, from now on, any employee who wants to log on to the internal facility can do it only from his/her office premises. The decision to block access from outside ISRO facilities was taken after the space agency's in-house cyber security team issued a warning, S Somanath, director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), ISRO's lead unit, said.
''There has been no such breach so far, but the threat exists. That is also the assessment of our cyber security team,'' he said. ISRO units, of which Thiruvananthapuram boasts three, incidentally, are some of the closely guarded facilities in the country. Security is no less stringent when it comes to pre-empting cyber attacks.
To keep out hackers and the like, ISRO facilities such as VSSC have strong safeguards in place, including restricted access and double and triple authentication. Logging on to official IT-enabled services from outside may not offer these safeguards, placing the agency at risk. In fact, ISRO has been careful about expanding IT-enabled services within the organisation due to the free-for-all nature of the internet and the secretive character of space research.