The Bureau of Police Research and Development on Thursday organised a conference on cyber security challenges, in collaboration with the National Cyber Research and Innovation Centre and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.

In his inaugural address, Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Kumar Mishra highlighted various challenges before the agencies from the national security perspective. He said the government had been taking measures, which included strengthening the legal infrastructure, to deal with them more effectively.

During the conference, top researchers and experts from Cert-IN, National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection, UIDAI, IITs, Maharashtra Police, Amazon, IBM and FireEye gave presentations on a range of issues.

The topics included the emerging cyberthreats and mitigation measures; cyber security in modern critical information infrastructure; best practices, secure cloud services and network infrastructure; prevention and mitigation initiatives; secure online public/financial services and citizens’ data; zero-trust model for cyber security; and application of artificial intelligence/machine learning models.

Several case studies were presented to examine the current rising trend of ransomware attacks, data thefts and other forms of cyberthreats from criminal syndicates and State actors. Email continued to be a favourite tool to infect systems with malicious software. The obstacles in identifying and bringing the perpetrators to book in cases of ransomware attacks and data thefts were discussed.

An expert elaborated on the need for timely identification of advanced persistent threats and their sources to prevent or limit the damage, while another expert apprised the participants of various threats at the hardware level, which were likely to increase in the future with further miniaturisation of the components. Certain limitations of the machine-learning models in cyber security applications were also examined.