Government asks industry bodies to tighten certification checks, conduct regular cybersecurity audits

"Security Vulnerability" phrase and PHP code appears in this illustration taken October 22, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration | Photo Credit: REUTERS

New Delhi, October 23: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has asked sectoral associations and industry bodies to strengthen certification processes and conduct regular security audits to prevent a recurrence of cybersecurity incidents such as the recent PHP vulnerabilities and security lapses involving eMudhra, a senior government official said.

“We have written to all the concerned industry bodies and associations to get better updates on certifications and regular audits to avoid such security incidents in future,” MeitY Secretary S Krishnan told businessline on the sidelines of an event here.

The government is reviewing a series of cybersecurity incidents reported over the past two days. The PHP Foundation, which maintains the programming language used by millions of websites, announced an urgent security update to address two critical vulnerabilities. Separately, Indian digital trust services provider eMudhra was found to have used weak security keys to issue website certificates.

Data Exposure

The country’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), also disclosed an incident involving the suspected exposure of customer data on the dark web.

Krishnan said the government was monitoring the developments and assessing what steps could be taken to help affected sectors address such incidents.

On cybersecurity, the Secretary said that it was crucial to remind ourselves again that securing data infrastructure was critically important.

While on one hand India was expanding the capacity of digital transactions and digital way of doing business across the range of industries as it was a matter of convenience, “it has many other spin-offs” too, Krishnan said.

Work to be Done

“There’s a whole range of digital public infrastructure which needs to be built for various sectors. In each of these areas, there’s work to be done and it needs to be expanded to a number of other places where, we can transact digitally. But, equally, very important at this point in time is to make sure that we are able to do this in a secure way,” he said.

Krishnan said the world is dealing with a number of cybersecurity episodes over the last two/ three days — some of them linked to AI — and some of them linked to other elements.

“I think it’s very important to remind ourselves again that securing a lot of this infrastructure and securing the way that these services are delivered is critically important,” Krishnan mentioned in a fireside chat round at KPMG’s Agrasar Bharat Manch 2026 event here.

Bigger Risks

He said it was interesting to note that many of the ways in which rogue agents are able to exploit and enter into systems is because somebody has not followed elementary cyber hygiene and therefore that becomes, again, an element of how organisations go about looking at these issues.

“I think these two aspects really need to work. On the one hand, expanding the capacity of digital transactions and digital way of doing business across a range of other issues. The second part of it is building an AI layer over it, so that with all the data which we have, we get better insights, better ways in which this can be used, easier ways in which it works,” Krishnan said.

And at the same time, make sure that all the cybersecurity related aspects of this, are addressed effectively because we shouldn’t open ourselves to bigger risks, he added.

Published on October 23, 2026