The Andhra Pradesh government has started taking steps to prevent the leak of citizen's personal data from government websites; a new government incident reporting portal called Andhra Pradesh Computer Response Team (APCRT) is likely to go live in about a week, reported HuffPost India. In June, several data breaches and vulnerabilities were discovered by security researcher Srinivas Kodali. It emerged that citizen data relating to medical purchases, ambulance calls, phone numbers, addresses and insurance status were easily accessible to anybody with an internet connection. The data was stored in vulnerable dashboards of the state government portals. After multiple breaches were reported, the Andhra Pradesh government ordered an audit of all government websites (which is 1200 websites FYI) and said the state will set up a portal Andhra Pradesh Computer Response Team (APCRT) to report such vulnerabilities and breaches. At the time, K Vijayanand, principal secretary, IT, AP government, said monthly audits will be conducted for all departments to find loopholes in data security and privacy. “We have asked the Andhra Pradesh State Cyber Security Operations Centre (APCSOC) to conduct an audit of all the departments’ websites to identify if any sensitive public data is available on them. Here on, we will audit all the portals for both cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy issues. The audits will be done on a monthly basis," he had said. the government also announced the APCRT portal, which would also have a call centre with ten phone lines meant for use cyber emergencies. This isn't the first audit…
