Govt nearly doubles allocation for cybersecurity projects in Budget 2024 | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #ransomware

At a time when cyber attacks are rampant on government institutions, the Indian government in the 2024 interim budget nearly doubled the allocation for cybersecurity projects from Rs 400 crore in 2023-2024 to Rs 750 crore in 2024-2025. Majority of these projects are taken up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

In 2022-2023, the allocated budget for cybersecurity projects was Rs 30 crore. However, for the 2023-2024 period, there was a significant increase. In this year’s budget, the allocation estimates have been revised to Rs 750 crore.

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This comes at a time when there have been several cybersecurity attacks on government institutions, most notably the ransomware attack that affected All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2023.

The annual report of India’s nodal agency for cybersecurity, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), released in November 2023, said that the agency handled 1,391,457 cybersecurity incidents in 2022.

Out of the 1.39 million cybersecurity incidents that CERT-In tackled, the mitigation of vulnerable services accounted for the largest number of incidents handled by the agency, totaling 875,892.