Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL) has awarded a Rs 40 million (Rs 40 mn) contract to state-owned Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) to establish a dedicated security operations centre (SOC) to protect its information technology and closed-circuit television infrastructure from cyber threats. The centre will operate round the clock from BMRCL's Byappanahalli premises and will monitor IT and CCTV networks while analysing logs, detecting suspicious activity and mounting responses to potential cyberattacks. The contract reflects a wider push to bolster cyber resilience across urban transport systems.

The security operations centre will integrate security information and event management, security orchestration, automation and response, threat intelligence and other cybersecurity tools on a unified platform and will deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve detection. The platform will correlate event logs with vulnerability information, network traffic and external threat intelligence to provide real-time security monitoring and prioritise incidents. Verified incidents will be escalated to BMRCL's IT team for containment and remediation.

Logs will be collected from CCTV video management systems rather than from individual cameras so that unusual internet protocol addresses or external access attempts can be identified without monitoring every camera feed. The system will enable the identification and blocking of unauthorised addresses entering the wide area network or the internet and BMRCL plans to extend monitoring to other critical subsystems in subsequent phases. This approach aims to reduce blind spots and improve incident response times.

BMRCL has mandated the use of Make in India products in its tenders, with Bharat Electronics acting as system integrator and SecureTech supplying the cybersecurity solution as original equipment manufacturer. The corporation's cybersecurity posture will be assessed against the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework to identify gaps and set out a roadmap to strengthen protections. The platform will include safeguards against malware, ransomware and rootkits and will provide a centralised view of threats across BMRCL's infrastructure.