Govt employees asked not to use third-party VPN, Google Drive and Dropbox

Indian government employees are advised not to use third-party virtual private networks (VPN) and cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox, according to a 24-point “cyber security don’ts” issued by the state’s National Informatics Centre (NIC).

The NIC’s 10-page guideline asks employees not to use third party toolbars, like download manager or weather tool bar in internet browsers, or external email services for “official communication”.

“Don’t use any 3rd party anonymization services (ex: Nord VPN, Express VPN, Tor, Proxies, etc.),” says the eighth point of don’ts. That advisory comes weeks after NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and Tor pulled out of India after the country’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In’s) asked all VPN service providers to store user data for five years.