Bangalore: India's Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) plans to jointly work with Russians to combat cyber crime including virus and hacker attacks in their computer networks, a top IT department official said today (Dec 4, 2004).

"We are trying to see how best our CERT can work with Russian authorities on Information Security and prevent attacks by virus, worms and hackers," Union IT Department Joint Secretary Madhavan Nambiar said in Bangalore.

Delivering his address at the Indo-Russian Information and Communication Technologies Cooperation Conference in Bangalore on the city outskirts, Nambiar said that the cyber security plan was in the early stages, but CERT had already signed a protocol with Russians on e-security.

He said that the three areas of cooperation with Russia in the IT domain were: software parks, Information Security and Software services.

The Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) was in the process of setting up a software park in Moscow, Nambiar said.

Later speaking to reporters, Russian IT Minister Leonid D Reiman invited Indian software service firms to leverage the engineering talent in his country to export software to Europe and the United States.

"We want to retain talent within Russia and Indian companies can work on projects in our country for customers in third countries like the Europe and America," he said.

Reiman said that the Russian IT industry team which has joined President Vladimir Putin's delegation was keen to learn about the success of India in the software sector and replicate it in their country.