Pakistan has no IT Policy Despite the Threat of Cyberattacks: Standing Committee

A meeting of National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication was conducted recently that was attended by the Director of the National Centre for Cyber Security and other senior officials. During the meeting of the standing committee of IT and Telecom, it was revealed that Pakistan doesn’t have any comprehensive IT policy despite the growing threat from cyberattacks.

Pakistan has no IT Policy Despite the Threat of Cyberattacks: Standing Committee

The Director of the National Centre for Cyber Security (NCCS) told the committee that digital assets are at serious risk as cybersecurity has no borders. There is a dire need of a comprehensive national cybersecurity policy along with a strategy to counter these cyber threats in an effective manner.

Furthermore, the director NCCS informed that under the centre, eleven forensic labs had been built in 10 universities, and they institute a plan to establish more centres for which Rs1.2 billion have been allocated by the federal government.

The committee was also told about some new inventions. The centre has built mobile forensic tool, computer forensic tool, social media forensic, IoT firewall, blockchain security tool, vulnerability scanning tool and intrusion detection solution.

However, still, the committee showed serious concerns, while noting that the Ministry of IT was not taken on board by the NCCS. In recent times, we have observed that cyberattacks are on the surge and our system is pretty vulnerable to that threat.

An example from the past week in which the National Information Technology Board (NITB) issued warning about the user’s web browser vulnerability to cyberattacks. This is a very serious matter and the government must lay out a comprehensive IT policy to deal with this matter as private data of many citizens is at stake.

Check out? NITB Warns Users After Critical Vulnerabilities found in Web Browsers