Curbing Cyber Trespass: An E-Governance Initiative
Introduction
In the late eighties, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, global changes towards strengthened IT deployments by governments occurred. Since then, both technology and e-governance projects have made great strides. Citizens are learning to take advantage of their modern modes of access in a wide variety of ways with the emergence of the Internet and mobile connections. In order to promote their communal, social and professional lifestyle, they have begun to expect ever more social media resources and guidance from government bodies and corporate organisations, generating ample of evidences that the new 'e-citizenship' is gaining momentum. Although the focus has largely been on optimization and digitalization, policy makers have also tried to use ICT technologies to communicate, increase networking, set up information management systems and provide infrastructure for various services. This varied widely from IT mechanisation in various departments at the community levels, electronic document processing and workflow systems, availability to welfare benefits, public grievance mechanisms, operational efficiency for high-volume routine transactions such as bill payment, tax dues, through the promotion of business models and the provision of market information, to having met economic development objectives.
The emphasis has varied across programmes, with some concentrating on allowing different government services to provide the citizen-state interface, and others focusing on improving livelihoods. Each state government has taken steps to create an IT response team to formulate the country's IT party manifesto, and public charters have begun to get displayed on government sites.
The generally accepted definition is: E-governance is the application of information & communication technologies to transform the efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability of informational and transactional exchanges with in government, between government and government agencies of National, State, Municipal and Local levels, citizen & businesses and to empower citizens through access and use of information. "e-government" or electronic government refers to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by government agencies for any or all of the following reasons:
• Speedier and more efficient delivery of public services
• Improving internal efficiency
• Exchange of information with citizens, businesses or other government departments
• Reducing costs or increasing revenue
• Re-structuring of administrative processes
Information Security
In the absence of a well-articulated security strategy, any e-governance project would remain revered for security breaches. The foundation of data security effectiveness is Information Security Policies. With regard to the security of data systems, the Network Security is meant to explain what is required of an organisation. The ultimate goal is to monitor or direct human behaviour by unintended or intentional acts in an effort to reduce the risk to intellectual property. The security and wellbeing of data sources is underpinned by data protection. For an organisation, they are the base, the real problem, of information security. Having the right knowledge at the right time in an organisation will make the difference between winning and losing. Data Protection can allow the user to monitor and protect information from deletions or unwanted leaks, unintentional or fraudulent modifications and alterations.
There are three aspects of data security:
Confidentiality refers to protection of data from unauthorized access e.g. to the press or to release by illegal disposal procedures, or to others who are not authorized for the same.
Integrity is about securing data from unauthorized alteration, and guaranteeing that records, such as a beneficiary list, can indeed be depended upon and is reliable and full.
Availability is to make sure that the data is accessible whenever it is needed.
Thus, three basic security principles, essential to information on the Internet are confidentiality, honesty, and availability.
When data is accessed or recorded by those not who are not allowed to do otherwise, the condition is known as breach of confidentiality. Confidentiality is a very important characteristic for certain kinds of assessment. Study data, health and insurance records and state investment plans are some of the prominent examples. There may be a legal responsibility in certain instances to safeguard the confidentiality of the citizens.
When data is changed in unpredictable ways, the outcome is known as loss of credibility. This implies that, either through mechanical failure or deliberate misconduct, unauthorised adjustments are made to details. For basic security and financial data used for activities such as electronic funds transfers, air traffic control, and financial accounting, honesty is especially essential. Data may be removed or become unavailable, leading to a lack of availability. They experience a denial of service when a user is unable to connect to the network or relevant services offered on the network.
Information Security Threats
A cyber attack has been a sort of malicious activity that uses alternative approaches to steal, modify or disrupt data or information services, targeting computer information systems, infrastructures, computer networks or personal computer devices.
Some of the common types of threats are:
Packet Sniffer: A packet sniffer, commonly known as network monitor or network analyzer, could legally be enough to track and troubleshoot network traffic by a network or system administrator. An operator can detect incorrect packets and use the data to identify bottlenecks and help sustain successful network data transmission by using the information gathered by the packet sniffer.
Probe: Probe is an attack class in which an attacker scans a network to collect information or locate attack vectors. The information can be used to notify an intruder with a map of the system and resources available on a network for manipulation, e.g. ipsweep, portsweep, nmap, satan.
Malware: The collective name for a variety of malicious variants of software, including viruses, ransomware and spyware, is malware. Malware, shorthand for malicious software, usually consists of cyber-attacker-developed code designed to inflict significant data and device harm or to obtain unauthorised access to a network. Usually, malware is transmitted via email in the form of a connection or file and allows the user to follow the link or open the file to activate the malware. Since the early 1970s, when the Creeper virus first emerged, malware has actually been a threat to people and organisations. Since then, dozens of types of malware have attacked the planet, all with the goal of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible.
Internet infrastructure attacks: Instead of individual wireless devices, these uncommon but serious attacks target key components of the Internet infrastructure. Network domain names, access control providers, and large archive sites with a large number of users are ome of the prominant examples. Automated attacks on a wide scale may also pose a threat to infrastructure.
Denial of Service (DOS) attack: A denial of service attack happens when an attacker renders a computing or memory resource too occupied or full to handle legitimate requests, preventing legitimate users access to a system, such as neptune, teardrop, smurf, pod, back, and ground. Attackers can "flood" a network with large amounts of data or consume a scarce or limited resource, such as process control blocks or memory, on purpose. They can also interact with network physical components or manipulate data in transit, including encrypted data. Computers on networks frequently have confidence relationships with one another, which can be abused. Before executing those commands, for example, the machine checks a set of files that determine which other computers on the network are allowed to use certain commands.
Improving Security in E-Governance
A robust protection necessitates a versatile approach that allows for adaptation to evolving circumstances, well-defined policies and procedures, the use of robust resources, and continuous diligence in order to make knowledge accessible to those who need it and can be trusted with it. It's a good idea to launch a security enhancement program by reviewing the site's current security situation.
Security policy: If it's necessary to be safe, it's also important to be certain. All of the security measures are implemented by powerful mechanisms. There are structured techniques and risk management methods in place to ensure that security policies are complete and that they are fully implemented. Policies can be disintegrated into sub-policies in complex systems, such as information systems, to make the distribution of protection measures to implement sub-policies simpler. A strategy is a recorded high-level plan for cyber security in an enterprise. It serves as a base for creating safe programming guidelines and procedures for users and system administrators to adopt, such as which defense mechanisms to use and how to configure services. The contents of a security policy prevent technology-specific problems because it is a long-term text.
Definition of acceptable use for users:
Guidelines for reacting to a site compromise.
High-level description of die technical environment of the site, the legal environment (governing laws), the authority of the policy, and the basic philosophy to be used when interpreting the policy.
Risk analysis that identifies the site's assets, the threats that exist against those assets, and the costs of asset loss.
Guidelines for system administrators on how to manage systems.
Audit systems and networks, and review logs on a daily basis. Many sites that experience cyber security incidents complain that inadequate audit data is collected, making it difficult to identify and track cyber attacks.
Things are done - steps are taken - decisions and strategies are carried out with best practices. Encryption, for example, is a best practice rather than a product or tool. There are various commercial and open-source resources that might be better adapted for a proposed accuracy.
Security Procedures: Procedures are comprehensive guidelines focused on the computer security policy. The procedures cover topics like retrieving programs from the network, connecting to the site's system from home or while on the road, using encryption, account authentication, setup, and monitoring.
Operational Technology: Intruders are constantly looking for new ways to gain access to networks and servers. Intruders can often gain access to systems with alarming ease if they have expertise in specific security issues, forms of electronic communication, and instruments to outsource data collection and system invasion. Security professionals must balance the continuity of system services for legitimate users with the vulnerability of complex network services and infrastructure to threat. Unfortunately, services often depend on the same device and network protocol characteristics that make them vulnerable to intruders. As a result, technology has developed to lessen the effect of such threats. There is no one technology that can fix all of the issues. Nonetheless, by carefully planning and systematically deploying personnel and operational technology, companies can greatly increase their resistance to attack. Data resources and properties can be safeguarded, suspicious behavior can be reported and analyzed, and effective responses to security incidents can be enforced in real time.
One-Time Passwords: Packet sniffers are widely used by intruders to intercept passwords as they move through networks during remote log in processes. As a consequence, all passwords should be encrypted as they move across networks. Since there are occasions where a password is needed to initiate a link before privacy can be secured, using one-time passwords is a safer option. Remote dial-up connections are a common example. To access network and data services, remote access, including those on work trips, dial into their agency's broadband database. But since attackers may monitor this initial exchange between the user and the server, it's critical that the passwords aren't reused. To put it another way, intruders should not be able to gain access by impersonating a legitimate user and using a stolen password.
Cryptography: It is sometimes necessary to encrypt the message sent in order to prevent anyone who is listening in on the channel from reading the contents of the messages. One of the main reasons intruders succeed is that the majority of the information they obtain from a system is in a format that they can read and understand. With millions of electronic messages passing through the Internet every day, it's easy to see how a strategically placed network sniffer could capture a wealth of information that users don't want shared with unanticipated readers. Intruders may distribute the data to others, alter it to misrepresent an individual or persons, or use it to declare war.
Firewells: A firewall is a set of related programs, located at a network gateway server that protects the resources of a private network from users from other networks. (The term also implies the security policy that is used with the programs.) An enterprise with an intranet that allows its workers access to the wider Internet installs a firewall to prevent outsiders from accessing its own private data resources and for controlling what outside resources its own users have access to. Its purpose is to eliminate from the International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCSIT'2011) Pattaya Dec. 2011123
stream those packets or requests that fail to meet the security criteria established by the organization. A simple firewall may consist of a filtering router, configured to discard packets that arrive from unauthorized addresses or that represent attempts to connect to unauthorized service ports. More sophisticated implementations may include bastion hosts, on which proxy mechanisms operate on behalf of services. These mechanisms authenticate requests, verify their form and content, and relay approved service requests to the appropriate service hosts. Because firewalls are typically the first line of defense against intruders, their configuration must be carefully implemented and tested before connections are established between internal networks and the Internet
Conclusion
As can be seen from the preceding debate, information security is a vital component of any e-government initiative. The security issues of e-governance in India, on the other hand, are not considered as important. It is obvious to see that government's strategic decision tend to compromise when it comes to high-end technological development, deployment, and maintenance in a wide range of symptoms. In e-governance projects, digital security is key. In the case of e-governance programs, government records and other essential materials must be shielded from unauthorized users. As a consequence, protection is essential to the success of such projects. To resolve inertia, any system design initiative must include e-governance as well as security systems that provide sufficient defence.
By Yamya Pandey