Indian government to join hands with Israel’s Verint for interception tools

[thestringshredder]

Earlier this month, the latest edition of the nation’s cyber security policy was announced, and now news has it that government will be teaming up with Verint Systems for interception tools, due to the increasing cyber security concerns. According to a report by The Economic Times, Verint Systems, an Israeli cyber intelligence provider, will soon get a contract from the Indian government to devise interception tools. These tools will help the Indian government to track encrypted communication services such as Gmail, Yahoo.mail, BlackBerry services, Skype and so on.

The news has it that Verint’s leadership team met Kapil Sibal in Israel and disclosed the company’s desire to work with the government to intercept all forms of encrypted communications which will address to India’s growing concerns over cyber security. An internal source from the telecom department told ET,”Verint is willing to work with the Indian government to address the issue of intercepting encrypted communications like Gmail, Yahoo.mail and others. It will shortly co-ordinate with DoT’s security wing and CERT-In teams to implement a customised interception solution.”

About a year ago, the government had identified around 15 types of encrypted communications, which supposedly couldn’t be tracked by the Indian law enforcement agencies. Verint has apparently supplied interception solution for tracking encrypted communications to 77 countries across the globe and can even customise the solutions as per Indian needs at the country’s Gurgaon unit. While most western countries do not allow Internet financial transactions (via computers and mobile devices) if the encryption level is less than 128 bits, India does not legally allow encryptions beyond 40-bit. The reason is simple, Indian security agencies lack technical resources to monitor online data transfers when the coding is beyond that threshold.

The government is also preparing to launch its in-house CMS or “Communications Monitoring System” by December this year. It will help the government to track voice calls, fax messages, text messages and MMSes across all telephone networks in the country. *** maintains that monitoring and interception in most countries is carried out by their own security agencies, and is also the reason for developing the CMS. However, Verint could possibly advice the government in the CMS rollout too.

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