The Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has concluded an internal investigation which revealed that employees of the nodal cyber agency had issued instructions to legal website Indian Kanoon to remove a specific court order from their platform, it said in a tweet on Sunday. On December 12, Indian Kanoon, received an email at 11pm from CERT-In’s incident response department stating that there was a “cybersecurity incident affecting” the organisation and therefore they required the contact details of the websites’ Chief Information Security Officer or Information Technology head. At around 11:30 pm, Indian Kanoon received a call from a person, identifying themselves as a CERT employee, to remove a particular court judgement, it said in a tweet. In its tweet, CERT-In said that “some employees, contesting a case in personnel matter, made a call to Indian Kanoon in their personal capacity asking them to remove the judgment as it puts their names & addresses in public domain. This is not an official communication from Govt.” CERT-IN did not respond to queries sent on Monday. MediaNama was able to track down the employee but they declined to comment. Abuse of power MediaNama has reviewed the judgement in question which came in a Central Administrative Tribunal case filed by government employees against the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), over alleged discrepancies in the recruitment of personnel for statutory bodies under MEITY, including CERT-In and the Standardisation, Testing and Quality Certification Directorate. Sushant Sinha, founder of Indian Kanoon, told MediaNama…
