India is unlikely to meet the target of creating a workforce of 500,000 cyber security professionals in next five years due to lack of infrastructure and investment, an official of security firm EC-Council said.
The country is lagging behind in its fight in cyber warfare which has adopted innovative ways to attack
governments and organisations causing huge financial losses, Jay Bavisi, the President of EC-Council, which is a major global certification and training organisation in information security domain, said.
On the government’s cyber security policy, which was launched early this month, he said that India is “extremely
late” on framing the policy.
Cyber security policy is a great vision statement but I don’t think India has got a tactical plan,” Bavisi said at an event here today.
India does not have the environment. It is yet to be created. I would be pleasantly surprised if India meet the
target (of creating workforce),” he said.
The National Cyber Security Policy aims at creating a work force of 5,00,000 professionals in the next five years
and build cyber security training infrastructure through public-private participation.
He said that even the US, which put in a lot of resources to create cyber security professionals, is seeing an annual growth of 15 per cent in trained workforce.
There is a need to involve academia like universities, impart training, set up labs and foster competition to deal with cyber security issues which is entirely missing in the country, he added.
India is ranked ninth on Kaspersky’s list of countries with the highest percentage of computer attacks. However the number of cyber security professionals in the country is very low, he said.
Bavisi said that many of government websites are still exposed to threats as proper investment has not been made to find a long term solution.
According to official data, more than 1,000 government websites were hacked in the last three years.
When a government website is got hacked they call professionals who fix the problem. But they have no budget to
carry on.
They have no budget to hire right people, to train them and defend their websites,” he said.
It is evident that the best way to solve the cyber plague is by introducing a cyber-vaccine programme that is needed to start at all levels of society through combative education plans, he said.
EC-Council (International Council of E-Commerce Consultants) is one of the world’s largest certification
bodies for Information Security professionals.
EC-Council is a member-based organisation that certifies individuals in various information security and e-business skills.
————————PTI