Vice Premier Chang San-cheng today hosted a committee meeting of the Executive Yuan's National Information & Communication Security Taskforce (NICST). Afterward, he held a press conference to raise overall public awareness of information security and help the public understand the government's current information security conditions and improvement strategies.
The committee members discussed the progress made on important information security tasks, including offensive and defensive cyber drills, revising the implementation plans for clarifying the information security responsibilities of government agencies, and evaluating Juiker, an instant messaging software developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
At the press conference, Chang talked about international and domestic information security threats and trends, the government's focuses and follow-up tasks. He expressed hope that by doing so, details about the government's information security can be opened to the public progressively.
The vice premier also awarded and praised agencies that performed outstandingly in cyber drills and information security audits last year.
In recent years, the Internet and information technology have gradually influenced the world's politics, economy, and military as well as people's daily life. The information security threats posed by foreign and domestic Internet criminals, militaristic states and radicals increase day by day.
Besides that, much key information infrastructure and many enterprises handling confidential information are facing ever more severe security problems due to their own vulnerabilities. Several major cyber attacks have taken place in the international community and paralyzed the networks of countries and organizations. The press has also revealed that a considerable amount of private information has been stolen from a number of enterprises and organizations, and organized hackers have even stolen government, national defense and business secrets through advanced persistent threats (APTs).
As for Taiwan, facing constantly updated attack methods, personnel and budget shortages in government agencies, and lack of information security knowledge and awareness, the Information and Communication Security Technology Center (ICSTC) under the NICST traced the APTs initiated from overseas against Taiwan's government agencies since 2009. The long-term trends showed that the hackers followed Taiwan's political and economic news carefully and launched attacks related to the subjects of conversation, using advanced techniques such as zero-day attacks. In the past three years, on average more than 300 information security cases were found and reported by Taiwan's government agencies annually. Although most of the cases were computer virus infections, they must be taken seriously to prevent proliferation.
Many agencies have instituted various information security mechanisms such as firewalls, invasion detecting systems and anti-virus systems. However, these mechanisms mostly provide single-point protection. In order to reinforce and augment information security, a dynamic monitoring mechanism must be established. Thus the administration has pushed government agencies to introduce outstanding private-sector information security service capabilities to assist in security operations centers' (SOC) "frontline" supervision.
The Government-Security Operation Center (G-SOC)—which was previously the responsibility of the ICSTC—has been changed to the second line of monitoring for information security, expanding the scope of information gathering for overall compilation, sorting and analysis of information security incidents reported by various government agencies. With national security in mind, government and private-sector information security coordination and collaboration will be enhanced in order to raise the government's capacity in intelligence gathering and analysis automation.
The ROC (Taiwan) has already instituted a comprehensive information security protection system and mechanisms. However, as the nation's political and economic situations are unique, the NICST has since last year promoted various information and communication security measures including:
‧Adjusting the NICST's organization structure.
‧Raising the NICST's administrative level by making the vice premier its convener.
‧Proactively promoting the transformation of the ICSTC into a new administrative corporation that would be known as the "National ICSTC."
‧Moving toward a three-tier development consisting of this new administrative corporation, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the NICST to consolidate the nation's overall information security system.
‧Selecting 20 organizations and agencies responsible for finance and the economy to conduct audits of their information security measures by evaluating three aspects: strategy, management and technology.
‧Conducting offensive and defensive drills with the Office of the President, the five yuans, special municipality governments, and various county and city governments as targets to help these institutions discover and improve upon 217 kinds of website vulnerabilities.
Subsequently, the NICST will continue to consolidate and reinforce various measures to augment the nation's overall information security defense capabilities by upgrading relevant organizational efficacy, improving relevant infrastructure, increasing the room for information protectors to maneuver, extending public-private coordination and collaboration, and enhancing agencies' response speed.