Government Launches Free Anti-Virus for Mobile Phones, PC, and Laptops

In order to promote cyber security, the government of India launched the Cyber Swachhta Kendra (CSK). It is a malware analysis center and has been launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY).

MEITY along with other Internet Service Providers (ISP’s), banks, academe and anti-virus organisations in the industry will provide the citizens the necessary digital tools to protect their important data on their laptops, PC and mobiles. These tools will eliminate the malicious content from their laptops, Smartphones and desktops. There are 13 banks and 58 ISP’s for now that have already joined hands with CSK.

While inaugurating the set-up of Botnet Cleaning and Malware Analysis Centre, IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad said that he wanted the Internet Service Providers to encourage their users to come on board and make use of the free service. “Come and use it in the event some malware has sneaked in the system”, he added.

Prasad also said that security and safety were important. He also added that Cyber threat is similar to bloodless war according to the Prime Minister of India. He was sure that not only cyber security would be a big area of Digital Swachh Bharat but also of digital employment, digital growth and digital commerce.

India is moving fast and catching up with the digitization. The country is already a part of the eminent group of countries that have malware cleaning systems for their citizens.

The botnet cleaning and anti-malware analysis center is a 90 crore set-up that would be spread over a period of 5 years and will help in removing the malicious software.

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CSK will provide specialized packages for consumers, start-ups, and businesses that have laptops, Smartphones or desktops.

The system has proposed that The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team(Cert-In) will monitor and identify botnet, malware and virus infected devices across different industries of media, banking, finance, manufacturing, etc. and inform the ISP’s or the concerned bodies.

The users would be given the link to the website that would carry the necessary information about how they would have to go about in cleaning the system.

For now, the Standardization Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) that is a division within the Ministry of Electronics and IT. They would charge about Rs 8 to 10 lakhs to scan and disinfect big IT systems of corporate bodies. However, the start-ups who are in the cyber security would be charged lesser, and the charges would be between Rs 4 to 5 lakhs.

Here is a list of Anti-virus Tools that have been made available:

Free Anti-Virus Tools

• USB Pratirodh (USB Protector) cleans storage devices such as external hard-disk, USB’s and memory cards.
• The M-Kavach is the anti-virus for smartphones.
• AppSamvid is especially for Windows OS. It is a desktop based whitelisting solution.
• One of the most important one in the list is the Free Bot Removal Tool that would be provided with QuickHeal.
• Another specialized tool is the Browser JSGuard which has been designed to detect and clean malicious JavaScript and HTML files in the browser.