We are not safe from cyber attacks: Palak

The country is not safe from the threats of cyber-attacks rather it is dwelling at the centre of this global crisis, ICT State Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak said today.

According to Tarique M Barkatullah, project director of BGD e-Gov CIRT and Director (operations) of Digital Security Agency, Bangladesh is among the top 10 countries under cyber security risk in case of Ransomware Trojan attacks.

Cyber-attacks recently increased worldwide amid a worsening global economic scenario sparked by the Covid fallout, Russia-Ukraine war and subsequent western sanctions disrupting food and energy supplies and causing inflation to surge worldwide.

Hackers steal information from public and private organisations and manipulate people and businesses financially.

Earlier, foreign hackers launched Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) cyberattacks on the national Covid vaccine register app "Shurokkha".

"They created a phishing site called "Shurokkha.com" to steal people's personal information but we were able to successfully thwart the attempt," said the state minister.

The Bangladesh e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (BGD e-Gov CIRT), which is responsible for maintaining cybersecurity in the country, identified the attacks during its regular monitoring.

Due to the emerging situation, BGD advised all authorities concerned to install or update anti-DDoS hardware and software and set proper anti-DDoS protection threshold limits to keep all important information infrastructure safe in Bangladesh as per the "Digital Security Protection Guidelines for Critical Information Infrastructure".

In 2019 Bangladesh scored 58th in the National Cyber Security Index (NCSI) published by Estonia, however, the country advanced to the 33rd position in 2022.