Description

On April 28, 2022, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a functional organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India issued guidelines under sub-section (6) of section 70B of the Information Technology Act to enhance and strengthen cyber security in the country. These new directions contain information security practices, procedure, prevention, response, and reporting of cyber incidents for Safe & Trusted Internet, As per CERT-In, the following guidelines will be effective from June 27, 2022 (60 days from the date of issue): 1. Synchronization of time clocks to NTP servers of NIC - This is applicable to all service providers, data centers, intermediaries, body corporate, and government organizations. The servers and infrastructure which are hosted in India, the time can be synced with the following: a. National Informatics Centre (NIC): -samay1.nic.in -samay2.nic.in b. National Physical Laboratory (NPL): -time.nplindia.org 2. For servers and infrastructure that are outside India, the time can be synced with the nearest server having atomic time. You may use https://pool.ntp.org/ 3. When storing the logs of any device, database, application, etc. ensure the local time as , as well as the UTC time, is recorded in separate columns, if possible, along with time zone details alongside the timestamp. 4. Reporting Cyber Incidents in 6 hours to CERT-In: Although many other developed countries expect the incidents to be reported in 48-72 hours, CERT-In has given a very aggressive time frame of 6 hours for reporting incidents. This means entities need to have a monitoring mechanism in place to identify cyber security incidents and a well-equipped incident response team along with an incident response plan must be in place. The relevant stakeholders should receive immediate intimation in case of a suspected security breach, and they must be in a position to triage and avoid false positives. A readiness assessment helps to check if the timeline can be met. 5. POC to Interact with CERT-In: Companies will need to assign a Point of Contact with whom CERT-In can communicate for any information. CERT-In has also provided a format in which such information needs to be provided to them. 6. Maintaining Logs for 180 Days: All organizations need to maintain logs in India for a rolling period of 180 days. This means the entities need to look at their log management policies, logging capabilities of devices and applications, secure log storage, and accessibility. An assessment to validate these points is important for all companies for ensuring compliance. Organizations may have data related to India hosted in overseas data centers, in that case, the logs must be replicated in India. a. It is also important to pass on such obligations to vendors and clients who handle/ store data, so that in case of a breach, they may be able to comply with the directives. 7. Additional obligations for Data Centers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers, Cloud Service providers and Virtual Private Network Service (VPN Service) providers: a. In addition to the requirements described above, CERT-In has provided a list of data points that need to be maintained by data centers and server providers for a period of 5 years or more. b. Virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers, and custodian wallet providers are required to maintain KYC details for 5 years. Although the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) stated that the new guidelines will come into effect from June 27, 2022, later, on June 28, 2022, they extended the implementation timeline of new cyber security directions till September 25, 2022, which facilitates micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to process the new guidelines easily. CERT-In is the national organization that performs various functions in the cyber security field as per provisions of section 70B of the IT Act, 2000. Additionally, CERT-In continuously investigates various cyberattacks and reports them around the globe.