Minister of State for Electronics and IT S. S. Ahluwalia on Wednesday cautioned against indiscreet use of the internet as it was fraught with grave threats of cyber-attacks, thereby depriving the user of precious data and loss of privacy.

Inaugurating FICCI's conference on Homeland Security-2018 on the theme 'Cyber Crime Management', in association with Vivekananda International Foundation, Ahluwalia advised self-regulation and exercise of utmost care in uploading and downloading information from the Net as any indiscretion would lead to involuntarily aiding the cyber criminals in their malicious intent.

In this context, he called for training people and creating professionals trained in ethical hacking to counter the designs of the cyber criminals.

On the occasion, Minister Ahluwalia released the FICCI-EY report on 'Confronting the New-Age Cybercriminal: Disrupting the web of crime'.

National Cyber Security Coordinator, National Security Council Secretariat, Mr. Gulsan Rai, called upon industry professionals to put their heads together to design a framework and systems to test whether the processes were resulting in doing the job efficiently.

He underlined the need for government, industry and other stakeholders to come together to evolve standards and guidelines on the use of systems to ward off cyber-attacks and create internal security systems to suit the country's needs.