Govt. of India’s Swatch Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission) has now been expanded into the digital world as well, quite literally. In one of the most useful missions ever launched under Digital India and Swatch Bharat, Govt. has launched a specialized hub called Bot Cleaning & Malware Analysis Centre, named as Cyber Swachhta Kendra in India.
You can get free anti-virus and bot removal tools for your desktops, laptops, mobile phones and even USP port.
Cyber Swachhta Kendra: Free Anti-Virus For All
Information Technology Ministry has launched Cyber Swachhta Kendra or Bot Cleaning & Malware Analysis Centre, allocating a budget of Rs 90 crore which would be spread across 5 years. This has specialised packages for both startups, businesses and consumers who are operating desktops, laptops and mobile phones.
While inaugurating this centre, Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “I would like ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to encourage their consumers to come on board, there is a free service available. Come and use it in the event some malware has sneaked into the system,”
At the time of writing, 58 ISPs and 13 banks have joined this forum for cleaning their systems, using the tools provided within this centre.
As per the system proposed as of now, The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) will monitor and identify malware, botnet and virus infected systems across various industries (finance, media, manufacturing, banking etc), and then send the information to ISPs and the concerned entities.
The users would be then be provided with the link to this website, which will have all the necessary tools to make the system clean.
As of now, Standardization Testing and Quality Certification (STQC), which is a division within Ministry of Electronics and IT charges a fees of Rs 8-10 lakh for scanning and disinfecting large IT systems of corporate entities. However, the fees would be brought down to the level of Rs 4-5 lakh for startups who are into the cyber security niche.
More details are awaited…
Download Free Anti-Virus Tools
As of now, there exists 5 major anti-virus and malware removal tools, which can be instantly downloaded by any user in India.
- The most prominent among them is Free Bot Removal Tool, which would be provided in association with QuickHeal. You can download it here.
- M-Kavach is the name of the anti-virus tool for mobile phones, which can be downloaded here.
- USB Pratirodh (USB Protector) is the name of the tool for cleaning storage devices like USBs, external hard-disk and memory cards. You can download the tool here.
- AppSamvid is a desktop based whitelisting solution, only for Windows OS. You can download it here.
- Besides, there is a specialised tool for detecting and cleaning malicious HTML & JavaScript files in the browser as well, called Browser JSGuard. You can download it here for Firefox and for Chrome here.
You can have more details about these free tools here.
Besides, a specialised National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) would be established by CERT-In by June of 2017, for which a budget of Rs 900 crore has been allocated. This will monitor and examine all cyber attacks being conducted inside India, and on Indian websites.
We had earlier reported that more than 1.1 crore web apps were hacked in India during the last quarter of 2016, even as 86 lakh hacks originated from India during the same period.
We will keep you updated as more details come in..
