NEW DELHI, October 1 — The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), on Thursday promulgated an exhaustive national cybersecurity advisory directing government bodies, banking entities, and critical infrastructure operators to immediately remediate cloud configuration gaps and Application Programming Interface (API) vulnerabilities.
The directive mandates the deployment of Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), enforced hardware-token Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), strict identity and access management (IAM) least-privilege policies on public cloud object storage, and automated patching of externally accessible API interfaces frequently targeted by transnational advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.
CERT-In reiterated the statutory requirement under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules and its 2022 cyber security directions, which mandate the mandatory reporting of all major cyber breaches and data leaks to the national agency within six hours of detection.
The legal and institutional mandate of CERT-In under Section 70B of the Information Technology Act 2000, the protection of critical information infrastructure under NCIIPC (Section 70), the provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act 2023, and national security challenges in cyberspace are high-priority topics across UPSC Civil Services (GS-III: Internal Security & IT Governance) and specialized banking IT officer exams.