NCERT tells provincial and sector CERTs to link their security centres to national hub

Pakistan's National Computer Emergency Response Team, NCERT, has told all provincial and sectoral CERTs to speed up building their own security operations centres and connect them to the National Security Operations Centre. ProPakistani reported the directive on 29 September 2026, citing an official letter.

CERTs that have not yet set up a centre, or have not linked it to the national one, must finish on priority. Each must name dedicated technical focal persons or teams and send their details to NCERT within seven working days of the letter. The report did not give the date of the letter.

The CERTs must also share high and medium severity incident logs, alerts and threat intelligence with the national centre continuously and in real time. NCERT said it issued the instruction under the CERT Rules 2023 and the National Cyber Security Policy 2021.

The structure is tiered. The national centre is Tier 1 and runs around the clock. Provincial and sectoral centres sit at Tier 2, and the SOCs of individual organisations at Tier 3 are meant to connect upward to them. The aim, according to the report, is end to end national visibility of cyber threats. Several sectoral CERTs are already feeding the national centre in near real time.

The letter follows an earlier push. At the Fortinet Security Day in Karachi, PKCERT Director General Dr Haider Abbas said public and private organisations had six months to set up operational security operation centres, according to Express Tribune. He cited 253 cyberattacks recorded in 2026 so far, against 927 across 2024 and 2025. Earlier instructions to CERTs set November 2026 as the date for their centres to be operational.

For Pakistani security vendors and managed service providers, the tiered model points to a wave of SOC buildouts, monitoring tools and integration work in the coming months.

Reported from ProPakistani, with background from Express Tribune and TechJuice.