IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said though digitization has brought in exposure to majority of the people but 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.

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He was speaking at the inauguration of the “NIC-CERT”, a setup of National Informatics Centre.

He mentioned that in the recent past there has been an exponential growth in cyber attacks leading to concerns of data theft which led to the government drafting the Data Protection Act.

“As Internet with its ever expanding canvas of opportunities is touching the life’s of people, it necessitates the requirement to upscale the existing security infrastructure,” he added.

The NIC-CERT has been setup with the objective of creating a comprehensive framework that integrates world class security components and inbuilt threat intelligence for detection, prevention and incident response.

Using the tools the team will correlate events that would help in generating a canvas of the attack surface and identify the vulnerabilities and possible exploits. The gathered intelligence assimilated with the knowledge of the open web would give the CERT the ability prevent and predict attacks, Prasad said.