October 23, 2016
At a time when governments the world over are struggling to tackle cyber-attacks and data breach, technology giant Microsoft India on Friday launched a full-scale Cybersecurity Engagement Centre (CSEC) in India.
After a successful year-long pilot – the centre is India’s first and Microsoft’s seventh Cybersecurity Centre globally – opened at a juncture when over three million debit cards of various banks are believed to be ‘tainted’ following a suspected security breach in the country.
“We believe security of critical information is imperative for our corporate customers, just as it is vital to ensure security and privacy of citizen data and transactions. Our first investment towards this was setting up our local data centres in India and the Cybersecurity Engagement Centre is the second,” Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, told reporters in New Delhi.
Microsoft’s strategy is to provide protection across all end-points – from sensors to the data centre, detection of attack using targeted signals, behavioural monitoring and machine learning – and eventually closing the gap between discovery and action taken to neutralise the attack.
According to the leading software security group Kaspersky Lab, India is among the top five countries in the world to be attacked by ransomware – malware that forces its victims to pay a ransom through certain online payment methods to regain their data.
In the last 12 months, Microsoft’s cyber-security management team met with over 100 organisations in the country to understand what plagued them.
“The team observed three common IT issues plaguing them that include unmanaged and unregulated IT assets usage, procurement and maintenance, poor knowledge of cyber hygiene among users withing organisations and inability of companies to timely monitor, detect and remove cyber threats,” the company said.
The CSEC will bring together Microsoft and its partners to identify and respond to cyber threats in the country.