New Delhi: To prevent leak of sensitive information in the wake of corporate espionage scandal, the Centre has issued stringent guidelines to its various departments, which also make security screening of personnel outsourced from elsewhere mandatory and avoiding doing confidential work on computers with net connection.
The guidelines, which have been issued in the past but made more stringent this time, ban the use of external memory devices to the USB drives on government computers.
The MHA came out with the guidelines against the backdrop of the leak of classified information from some ministries including the ministry of petroleum and natural gas. “The ministries and departments will ensure that confidential work is not done on computers connected to the internet and it must to ensured that external memory device cannot be connected to the USB drives on these computers,” the guidelines said.
All bureau heads have been asked to designate such computers on which confidential work will be done.The guidelines have been circulated among all the ministries on June 30.
The HRD ministry and several others having a sizeable number of staff recruited through outsourcing, have circulated the guidelines to all bureau heads, asking them to ensure that security screening of all such staff has been done.
Further, raising concern over the misuse of photocopying machines, the guidelines said officers of the sections concerned where the equipment are installed must get those code-locked. “Counting devices in photocopying machines and other office equipment should be made good use of so that unauthorised copying is not done. CCTV cameras can also be deployed judiciously,” the circular said.
