Cyber Rebirth

It must be because of my graduation and three months of corporate life after that, for all the problems I am studying about right now, I am tending towards a cyber solution, to be frank we need to agree that there is mounting importance in making the two ropes into a knot, for development.

- With growing concerns about ‘privacy’, everyone wants a secure and flashy site, whatever the need be. 

- User Interface grows in importance as the internet users increase in number

In a day of great advances in the Server Technology and Server Protection tactics in the cyber world, it is but an ignominy that an individual could hack eight Indian government sites, all of which after hacking are not of great difficulty to be defaced, keeping in view the stature of the source code it can have. It is of great importance, that in an age where a school kid relies on the internet to complete his homework, the government sites in India are in such a vulnerable situation.

SERVER SECURITY:

India, an emerging power in the field of information technology, known for the number engineers it produces year after year, does not have a decent way of protecting the sites from getting hacked, let alone portraying the services online? How would a customer, with growing awareness for privacy, trust the online services with the sites being so assailable?  Need is that the sites are developed in security and design to appeal to the customers, like the private sector is attracting customers.

As a country producing 3 million new graduates, of which 1.1 million are software engineers, each year, with adept human resources in the field of IT, it is deplorable that when a mere citizen having a Social networking site, page can control with great efficiency the information available about him on the net, the nation is not able to look into checking the number of sites being hacked every day.

Seems like the Technology Vaporware, 2009 could only get down the numbers from 600s to 117. Though a great number progress has been made, for a country like India, with such a stature in Information Technology, the numbers are still high. Most of the government sites take advantage of frames in presenting a large amount of information in a static web page which is vulnerable to the techniques used to gain access to unauthorized information through advanced search queries. Google hacking employs searching sites using special characters, logical operators and operators such as cache, filetype, link, site, intitle, inurl.

Lack of a prescribed procedure for auditing, hosting, maintenance and upgrading of security measures and new advancements can be taken as he main reasons for this.   

·        Government websites and applications have to be audited from the cyber security perspective prior to their hosting and after, on a regular basis, like really strict vigilance.

·        Hosting the websites which haven’t undergone a strict cyber security audit should not be made possible.

·        Immediate action should be taken in upgrading the security of the hosting structure.

·        Alerts regarding the latest developments in cyber crime and how to dodge them.

·        Damage caused by Cross site shifting should be  taken into consideration.

·        Any form of inputs like page headers, cookies, query string, hidden fields used on forms and forms fields used to gather some sort of input from the users should be validated before an update.

DESIGN AND USER-INTERFACE:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

Nevertheless, it is true that what looks good is called ‘attractive’ for a reason. More than 66% of the users give importance to the design and user interface, in a site that provides or vouches for services. Serious thought has to be put in the direction of improving the design and support patterns that are incorporated in various Indian websites, especially those that are into services related to communication. Less number of frames can be incorporated in the website to make them more browser compatible, look wise. Also, for those who say that the ‘Lorem Ipsum factor’ of saying that the design matters only a little, in today’s world one has to realise the importance of design and User Interface compatibility to an average customer. When the appearance causes a deep veneration and presentation remains good, also as long as one can place trust in the security systems only then can one want to be a customer.

Though impossible to negate the hacks in total, a dedicated capacity of efforts has to be put into this area not only to protect the government sites from being hacked, but also to improve the reliance of the people on the public sector sites for information and services.