ISLAMABAD, May 10: A comprehensive policy and implementation plan to host the websites of the government within the country and abroad has been prepared by a committee constituted by the federal minister for information technology, Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari.

The spokesman for the ministry said the government was committed to provide necessary resources for the implementation of the recommended plan within the shortest possible timeframe and an announcement in this regard was likely to come from the federal minister early next week.

Nooruddin Baqai, the head of the committee, said the PTCL and the IT industry had already implemented some immediate measures to mitigate the risks of ‘Denial of Service (DOS), attacks. Recently, the Pakistani websites were hacked by the Indian hackers. The spokesman said the PTCL had agreed to sign a service level agreement with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) bandwidth and now SLA would compensate industry in case of service outages.

The spokesman said the recommendations finalized by the committee to improve network security and the security policy with execution plan and timetable would be made public by next Tuesday (May 13).

He said 50 per cent bandwidth of majority of ISPs had already been shifted to alternate IP backbone network also managed by PTCL following talks between MOIT, PTCL, NTC, EDG and ISPAK.