The Hon. Eranga Weeraratne - Deputy Minister of Digital Economy

¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, first, to clarify: the responsible portfolio is the Ministry of Digital Economy. I answer on behalf of the Minister.

¶ 02 1. The incident was a technical failure. One hard disk reached 100% utilization, triggering an automatic fail-safe shutdown of part of the LGC to protect integrity and prevent data corruption. Immediate steps were taken to restore services; since Saturday night, services have been online and issues fully resolved.

¶ 03 2. It was an internal systems failure. There is no evidence of external intrusion. At no point were data security or integrity compromised. Restoration adhered to high data protection and security standards. No data loss has been reported; services are now operational.

¶ 04 3. Over the past 12 months, there were no major or prolonged outages on critical platforms hosted on LGC. About two months ago, a brief disruption due to a network component issue was rectified within a couple of hours. No cyber-security incident was reported. Post-incident, ICTA enhanced monitoring of affected components and commenced procurement for LGC 2.5 to address current shortcomings.

¶ 05 4. Affected institutions temporarily reverted to manual processing, thus continuity of service delivery was maintained. No precise estimates of financial or economic impact have been submitted to ICTA or the Ministry to date.

¶ 06 (Clarification) Systems like ASYCUDA operate via separate data centres and were not affected. While some government services were impacted, manual fallback ensured service continuity. No institution has provided quantified loss data thus far.

¶ 07 5. Under the current LGC (established 2018), data backups are managed by each organization; there is no centralized backup. This is a key reason to procure LGC 2.5, which will include secure centralized backups at a central location with geo-redundant architecture to ensure high availability, resilience and disaster recovery readiness. It will implement daily incremental, weekly full, and monthly full backups retained for one year. Geo-redundancy removes single points of failure; off-site replication will address downtimes. Real-time network and system monitoring will auto-alert anomalies for rapid mitigation. Hence, we opted for LGC 2.5.

¶ 08 6. Data hosted on LGC remained fully intact and uncompromised. The National Cyber Security Operations Centre (NCSOC) actively monitored multiple LGC services during the period; no incidents were detected or reported. Monitoring logs confirmed no unauthorized access or breach attempts.

¶ 09 7. To restore confidence, we are implementing: - National Cyber Security Policy with mandatory Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) and remediation by institutions. - Identification and protection of Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) across finance, health, energy, public administration, etc. - Establishment (September) of NCSOC for 24/7 centralized monitoring of CII to prevent and proactively respond to attacks. - AI-powered threat detection at NCSOC with malware and threat-hunting tools for predictive detection and early prevention. - Drafting a new Cyber Security Law to establish a Cyber Security Regulatory Authority with regulatory and enforcement powers across public and private critical infrastructure. - Accession to the UN Convention against Cybercrime to enhance cross-border investigation, evidence-sharing and legal cooperation, strengthening global trust. - A joint cybersecurity task force for the financial sector led by the Ministry of Digital Economy, SLCERT, TRCSL with CBSL and licensed banks to counter phishing and digital fraud.

¶ 10 8–9. The Cabinet process to enact comprehensive cybersecurity legislation is underway, including establishing: - Digital Economy Authority (DEA) to govern the digital economy agenda, and - Cybersecurity Regulatory Authority (CSRA) to enforce security on all Government digital platforms.

¶ 11 The Digital Economy Blueprint outlines Sri Lanka’s roadmap with layered architecture—core infrastructure, Digital Public Infrastructure, and service platforms for citizens/businesses—underpinned by trust, governance and cybersecurity across all layers.

¶ 12 10. To prevent recurrence, ICTA is migrating workloads to LGC 2.5, reducing reliance on legacy systems. Disk utilization has been reduced below 88%, and as migrations proceed, legacy workloads will be retired to free capacity. NCSOC will monitor LGC 2.5 continuously; SLT Data Centre NOC will ensure KPI compliance 24/7.

¶ 13 Additionally, the Government is initiating procurement for a second cloud platform by year-end, adopting a multi-cloud strategy so data is replicated across environments to maximize availability, resilience and security.