NSE intros ‘Cyber Swachhta Kendra’ to fortify stockbrokers from cyber-attacks

On October 16, the NSE in its statement has emphasized on the increasing prevalence of cyber-attacks all over the world, highlighting the profound impact of these incidents on businesses and the compromise of sensitive data through malware infections at endpoint computing devices.

According to the statement, “In recent times, there has been a surge in cyber-attacks in organizations across the globe impacting the continuity of their business operations and causing sensitive data leakage through malware infections at endpoint computing devices. To mitigate such malware and botnet infections, CERT-In has launched an initiative named ‘Cyber Swachhta Kendra’ (CSK), which provides information and enables organizations to disinfect the computing devices using free-of-cost malware and botnet cleaning tools.”

Stockbrokers who have more than 50,000 active traded clients and also provide Internet Based Trading platforms, are asked to enroll themselves on the CSK platform by November 6, 2023. However, the NSE statement also extended the invitation to other members who may not meet these criteria, allowing them to voluntarily subscribe to the services of CSK.

The platform has been set up seeing a global rise in cyber-attacks.

Under the guidelines for onboarding of stockbrokers onto the platform, the following details have been asked: 1. Member ID; 2. Member Name; 3. Registered and Correspondence address; 4. Details of the number of data centres and their locations; 5. Name and contact details (email ID and postal address) of the Chief Information Security Officer/ Chief Information Officer (CISO/CIO); 6. All Public IP address ranges used by respective organization (data centre, branches etc.) in CIDR notation. (Classless Inter-Domain Routing -CIDR); and 7. Details of dedicated point of contact / email id for receiving automated email notification from "Cyber Swachhta Kendra" on daily basis.

These details have to be submitted to csk@cert-in.org.in.