CHENNAI: All government establishments in villages will be enabled with free Wi-Fi within a year with around 50,000 km of cable being laid across the State. The wifi will be protected by an emergency response team that will prevent hackers from stealing data, said Santhosh Babu, State Information Technology Secretary, on Friday.
Speaking at the International Computer Security Day conference, he said “While our nation has a Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-In), a national nodal agency to resolve computer security problems, we are striving to build a Computer Emergency Response Team- Tamil Nadu( CERT-TN). At a cost of Rs 29.39 crore, we are also creating a Cyber Security Architecture, that will detect unwanted intrusion and stop stealing of information, he said.
Warning about information being sold he said, “Information is a commodity that is bought and sold in the grey market. Most of us do not understand the seriousness of our identity being stolen. Citizens should be aware about cyber crimes and should take necessary steps to secure the data at our level.”
Any information shared on the internet reaches the servers in the United States of America before it reaches us, he said. With the upcoming Cyber Security Architecture, any information that is shared will be scanned and prevented, if the content is of high value, before it reaches the open space in the server.
“Cable wires will be laid over 50,000 km of landscape across Tamil Nadu to provide high speed internet connectivity through free wifi at village level. The wi fi will be provided at all government establishments like hospitals and police stations,” he said.
He also said the office of the Director-General of Police here is being transformed into a ‘paperless e-office’ towards which many officers are striving.
Applauding the work of the State cyber crime police officers, Santhosh Babu said the officers are managing to resolve any intrusion in CCTNS website which is vulnerable and anyone can place an FIR inside.
He said it is a must to warn people about the bitcoin transactions and any other usage that goes through the dark web. “Security on the cyberspace is not a necessity, it’s a national security issue,” he said.
City police commissioner A K Viswanathan said about 10,254 complaints were lodged in the cyber crime cell in the last five years and 399 cases were solved.