MIIT Issues Cybersecurity Emergency Response Plan for Public Internet

On November 23, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued the Cybersecurity Emergency Response Plan for Public Internet following the Cybersecurity Law (CSL), and National Cybersecurity Emergency Response Plan among other emergency response laws and regulations, with immediate effect.
 
The plan is to guide basic telecommunication carriers, domain name registration management and services, and Internet firms (including industrial Internet platform companies) in dealing with cybersecurity emergencies, such as network interruption (congestion), system breakdown (errors), data leakage (loss), virus infections, that are caused by cyber attacks, cyber intrusion, malicious programs, and others causing or having the potential to cause serious social damage or influence, and therefore require management from central and local telecom administrations.
 
The plan classifies public Internet emergency incidents into four levels: “extremely significant incident”, “significant incident”, “major incident”, and “general incident”, based on the scope of affected areas and seriousness of the damage caused. For example, the following could constitute an “extremely significant incident”: 

• Majority of Internet users nationwide can not access the Internet;
• Efficiency of DNS for top level domain (.CN) dramatically drops;
• Over 100 million Internet users’ information is leaked;
• Virus widely spreads and explodes nationwide;
• Other cybersecurity incident causes or may cause serious damages.