Dhaka: The government has set up a Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) at Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) to secure its online public service delivery platform network, official sources said.

They said the CIRT has been set up under a World Bank-funded Leveraging ICT for Growth, Employment and Governance (LICT) Project to protect its e- (electronic) government platform from the fast growing cyber attacks and cyber crimes.

‘The government wants to make it fully operational at a time when cyber attacks and cyber crimes are causing a serious threat to its online activities and public service delivery platform network,’ State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak told United News of Bangladesh, a local news agency, on Friday.

He said the CIRT has been set up to make online service delivery uninterrupted and act promptly to address the problems of cyber attacks and cyber crimes in any government offices.

The state minister said as part of journey towards establishing e-Government, most of the public services are being digitised putting an end to the last year public service delivery system, and step has also been taken to introduce paperless communication in all government offices.  

‘We want a secure e-Government platform and the newly set up CIRT is one of the initiatives to protect that platform,’ he said.

According to sources, the government has established CIRT to help ensure the protection of the nation’s critical information infrastructure and assist in drafting the overall plan on the country’s approach to cyber related issues.  

BCC executive director SM Ashraful Islam said the BCC CIRT has just started functioning to monitor the internet gateway of BCC to ensure security of the government websites.

‘After the capacity building of the personnel, the government CIRT will cover government’s cyberspace to secure it from cyber attack,’ he said adding the government’s cyberspace needs to be safe and secure for the smooth functioning of online activities as well as e-Government.

The BCC Executive Director said the entire government approach is to transform e-governance as the two BCC flagship projects - BanglaGovnet and InfoSarker -- have brought over 18,000 government offices under online connectivity.

There is a National Data Centre in BCC and the construction work to set up another Tier-4 Data Center attached to Kaliakoir Hi-Tech Park and Software Technology Park in Jessore is going on in full swing, Ashraf said adding the establishment of Disaster Recovery Site (DRS) in Jessore is also progressing well.

‘Our ultimate goal is to protect e-Governance, while IRT will help ensure the safe journey of Digital Bangladesh to some extent,’ the BCC boss said.

‘BCC-CIRT established under LICT Project will act as government CIRT to protect the government website and information hosted in National Data Center,’ Tarique M Barkatullah, Director of National Data Centre said.

He said the main objective is to take preventive measure as well as develop a solution to protect information security and save IT networks.