Secure yourself, offices from digital criminals: Ministry of Home Affairs

To secure offices from digital criminals, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has issued stringent guidelines for the government officials to take basic minimum precautions from being cyber victim and exposing government to cyber crooks.

In a 24-page internal note prepared by Cyber Division, the ministry states: "Each organisation should identify additional measures for information security in accordance with their use scenarios, sensitivity of data, business continuity and other relevant factors."

It warns government officials not to store classified information on private cloud services; doing so may attract legal action, in case of data leakage.

The ministry has asked officials to use only government-provided email address for official communications and carry out all classified work in a standalone computer not connected to the internet. It also stressed that the operating system, application and software patches including anti-virus software should be up to date.

"Treat sensitive data carefully and use encryption to securely encode sensitive information," the document stated. It also states that officials should not give remote access, file and print sharing option to other computers.