The ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) stall featuring seminar sessions including those on  IT literacy and IT/ BPO at  Deyata Kirula 2012  national exhibition drew crowds. Viewers, including   students, teachers parents and farmers  thronged the ICTA stall as ICTA made use of the opportunity  to display  several  of  its projects under the  e-Sri Lanka initiative. 

A special  feature at the ICTA stall of Deyata Kirula  was the  workshop by  the Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL). Called ‘Dayata IT’, the CSSL newest programme  aimed at popularising ICT added luster to ICTA stall with its first workshop  under the programme. It was aimed at giving some awareness about IT, IT education, IT higher education road map,  and ICT career road map to the students and parents. 

As the apex body responsible for implementing the ‘e-Sri Lanka’ Development Initiative ICTA  implements this initiative via a six-pronged strategy . This  encompasses building the implementation capacity, building the information infrastructure and an enabling environment, developing ICT human resources, re-engineering the  Government and delivering citizen services, and leveraging ICT for economic and social development through public-private partnerships.

The Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team | Coordinating Centre (Sri Lanka CERT|CC)  coordinated with  the Asia Pacific Computer Security Incident Response Team (APCERT) recently for mitigating cyber threats.  

This global coordination exercise took place when APCERT successfully completed its annual drill to test the response capability of leading Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) from Asia Pacific economies.  A noteworthy specialty of this year’s annual drill  was that for the first time, APCERT involved the participation of the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation – Computer Emergency Response Team (OIC-CERT).  This was in consequence of a Memorandum of Understanding on collaboration signed in September, 2011.

The theme of the APCERT Drill 2012 was “Advance Persistent Threats and Global Coordination”.  The objective was for participating teams to exercise incident response handling arrangements locally and internationally to mitigate the impact of advance persistent threats. The drill targeted such threats that involved large scale malicious software propagation and attacks capable of impairing the critical infrastructure and economic activities. In the process this exercise reflected the strong collaboration among the economies. Furthermore, it enhanced the communication protocols, technical capabilities and quality of incident responses for assuring Internet security and safety.