Daijiworld Media Network - New Delhi
New Delhi, Aug 17: Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey on Monday announced two new initiatives aimed at strengthening cybersecurity, incident reporting and information sharing across the securities market ecosystem.
Addressing the SEBI Symposium on Cyber Defence, Pandey said cyber threats transcend organisational and regulatory boundaries and can have consequences across interconnected institutions and even national borders.
“Cyber threats do not respect organisational boundaries. They do not respect regulatory boundaries. And they certainly do not respect national borders,” he said.
SEBI has launched a revamped Incident Reporting Portal and a new Cyber Suraksha Portal as part of its efforts to strengthen cyber resilience across the securities market.
Pandey said a cyber incident originating in one organisation could spread through vendors, technology platforms, third parties or other connected institutions. He stressed that cyber resilience therefore needs to be strengthened not only at the level of individual organisations but across the wider financial ecosystem.
The revamped SEBI Incident Reporting Portal is designed to make the reporting of cybersecurity incidents more structured, timely and actionable. The portal is aligned with the Financial Stability Board's (FSB) Format for Incident Reporting Exchange (FIRE), which aims to bring greater consistency to incident reporting and reduce friction in cross-border reporting.
The second initiative, the Cyber Suraksha Portal, will function as a central platform for sharing cybersecurity-related information among stakeholders. It will facilitate the exchange of cybersecurity knowledge, vulnerability alerts, policy measures and insights gained from cyber incidents.
“These are not merely technology platforms,” Pandey said, stressing that their effectiveness would ultimately depend on how effectively institutions use them to share information, learn from incidents and respond promptly.
He said lessons from a cyberattack on one institution should help protect other institutions, while effective practices developed by regulators or countries should serve as useful references for the broader financial ecosystem.
Pandey also emphasised that cyber resilience should not be viewed simply as an effort to ensure that systems are never attacked.
“Cyber resilience does not mean assuming that our systems can never be attacked. It means building the capability to anticipate, withstand, respond to, recover from and learn from an attack,” he said.