Jammu & Kashmir's Dual Cybersecurity Strategy: Portal Audit and New Verification System

In a significant move toward proactive digital governance, the Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) administration in India has unveiled a two-pronged cybersecurity strategy that combines infrastructure hardening with enhanced community safety measures. This initiative marks a deliberate shift from responding to incidents to preventing them by systematically reducing attack vectors and closing intelligence gaps.

The first pillar of this strategy involved a comprehensive cybersecurity audit of all government department websites and digital portals. The audit, conducted by the J&K government's IT unit, aimed to map the entire digital footprint of the public sector, identify redundant assets, and assess security postures. The findings were stark: out of the numerous portals in operation, 35 were classified as redundant, outdated, or no longer actively maintained. These portals represented a tangible security risk, as unpatched and unmonitored websites are prime targets for cybercriminals seeking to deface government assets, host malicious content, or use them as footholds for lateral movement into more critical networks. Their immediate decommissioning is a classic example of attack surface reduction—a fundamental principle in cybersecurity that eliminates unnecessary points of entry before they can be exploited.

This cleanup operation is more than just digital housekeeping. Each decommissioned portal removes a potential vulnerability from the public-facing internet. For cybersecurity professionals, this underscores the critical importance of continuous asset management and inventory. Shadow IT and legacy systems that linger beyond their useful life are endemic problems in both public and private sectors, often leading to catastrophic breaches. J&K's systematic audit provides a replicable model for other government bodies: first, discover and catalog all assets; second, evaluate their necessity and security status; third, decisively retire what is not needed.

Simultaneously, the second pillar of the strategy focuses on building new, secure digital infrastructure to address a specific physical security concern. The Jammu & Kashmir Police have launched the 'Kirayedar' portal, a dedicated online platform for tenant verification in the Jammu region. Traditionally, tenant verification has been a manual, paper-based process prone to delays, inconsistencies, and potential fraud. The Kirayedar portal digitizes and centralizes this process, allowing landlords, property owners, and police to manage verification applications, background checks, and approvals through a single, secure channel.

From a cybersecurity and data protection perspective, the launch of Kirayedar is significant for several reasons. Firstly, it replaces an insecure, fragmented process with a controlled system where data handling, storage, and access can be governed by defined security policies. This reduces the risk of personal identifiable information (PII) leakage through informal channels. Secondly, by integrating with police databases, it enhances the accuracy and speed of background checks, improving real-world security outcomes. The portal effectively creates a verified digital identity trail for rental agreements, which can deter criminal elements from using rental properties for illicit activities.

This dual strategy of 'reduce and rebuild' offers valuable lessons for the global cybersecurity community, especially within the public sector. J&K's approach recognizes that security is not a one-time project but a continuous cycle of assessment, remediation, and innovation. The website audit tackles the problem of legacy risk and technical debt, while the Kirayedar portal addresses a procedural and intelligence gap with a secure digital solution.

For Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and government IT directors, the key takeaways are clear: Proactive audits are essential for managing cyber risk. A sprawling, unmanaged digital estate is a liability. Consolidating services into fewer, better-secured portals improves both efficiency and security posture. Furthermore, cybersecurity initiatives are most effective when they are directly tied to tangible public safety outcomes, as demonstrated by the link between a secure verification portal and community policing.

The J&K model demonstrates that effective public sector cybersecurity requires both the courage to decommission the old and the vision to build the new with security baked in from the start. As governments worldwide accelerate their digital transformation, such holistic strategies that blend defensive cleanup with proactive, secure service delivery will be crucial in building resilient and trusted digital public infrastructures.