Important Facts For Prelims
NATGRID to Link Social Media Accounts to Central Database
- 13 Sep 2019
- 2 min read
Recently, National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) has proposed to link social media accounts to central databases.
- Linking social media accounts will help to track online terror-related information exchange through individual accounts, online Radicalisation across the country.
- But at the same time linking the social media accounts to sensitive government data could expose the system to “Trojan Attacks.”
National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID)
- NATGRID is the integrated intelligence grid connecting databases of core security agencies of the Government of India.
- NATGRID is intending to set up an Entity Extraction, Visualization, and Analytics (EVA) system.
- It was first proposed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008.
- It is a counter-terrorism measure that collects and collates a host of information from government databases including:
- Tax and Bank account details,
- Credit card transactions,
- Visa and Immigration records,
- Itineraries of Rail and Air travel.
- The combined data from NATGRID will be made available to 10 Central Intelligence Agencies.
- NATGRID faced opposition on charges of possible violations of privacy and leakage of confidential personal information.
Trojan Attacks
- Trojans are non-replication programs
- It operates without the permission or knowledge of computer users.
- Trojans infect outside machines only with the assistance of a computer user, like clicking a file that comes attached with an email from an unknown person, plugging USB without scanning, opening unsafe URLs.