India should prepare for cyber war

It is now beyond the shadow of doubt that the perpetrators of the high-intensity bomb blast at the High Court of Delhi on September 7 used cyberspace to give shape to their evil design. Not a single case of urban terrorism since 26/11 has been solved. This points to a “shoddy and far from tech savy” intelligence-gathering mechanism.

India to organise needs to organise a full-fledged cyber command designed to prevent hacking of computer networks by white collar criminals, the siphoning strategic data stored in information systems by countries and organisations inimical to India. A cyber command should also have the capacity to defend the country’s networks against a full scale cyber war.

For instance, cyber strategy recently unveiled by the United States is designed to take care of economic security, law enforcement, military governance, international development and internet freedom aspects of the cyber domain. Prior to that in 2009, the Obama administration had authorised the setting up of a Cyber Command in response to the growing threat to US cyber security. As it is, the US government also runs the National Security Agency (NSA) whose mission objective is to “protect US national security system and to produce foreign signals intelligence information”. The electronic eavesdropping strategy of NSA encompasses radio broadcasting, internet calls and other forms of communications that could be intercepted.

A section of strategic analysts believe that cyberspace could very well be the new realm of warfare wherein the enemy will remain invisible even as the timing and nature of the attack will be designed to inflict “maximum damage” on the identified adversary. Stealth and anonymity are the advantages enjoyed by cyber hackers. Since cyber communications is still in an evolutionary stage, there is now no foolproof firewall with which to protect the networks against the manipulation of cyber invaders. Evidently, there is no denying the fact that a well-trained and highly motivated group of hackers can paralyse the banking and financial sector, public utility services as well as major infrastructural facilities. In fact, while addressing the United Commanders Conference in New Delhi in April 2010, Indian defence minister A K Antony had stressed the point that while cyberspace has emerged as an important medium for information sharing its susceptibility to misuse by anti-social and anti-national elements is now widely recognised. The minister called upon the armed forces brass to coordinate closely with various national intelligence agencies and prepare a road-map to counter cyber attacks and cyber terrorism.

Significantly, a most recent report from Norton Cybercrime reveals that in India approximately 29-million people fell victim to a variety of cyber crimes and cumulatively suffered a loss of US$7.6-billion in 2010.According to this well documented report in India one out of five online adults have fallen a prey to some sort of cyber crime. Cyber security experts believe India is now turning into one of the top hubs for all cyber criminal activities. They have also warned that with an increasing number of Indians accessing the internet via their mobile phones, the incidence of cyber crime is all set to go up by substantially.

Against this backdrop, for quite sometime now, security experts and defence strategists have been pointing out to the need for India to realise a robust technological command centre to defend its global network of computers. The idea is that both the defensive and offensive capabilities should be developed under one roof. In particular, the Indian security agencies are concerned about the spyware or malware embedded into imported products which can be exploited by unfriendly countries to disrupt key sectors.

In the light of the increasing threat to the information network of the Indian defence forces allegedly from China-based cyber spies, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has initiated an ambitious research project on cyber security with a strong focus on developing a foolproof Computer Operating System (COS). “We have opened three centres at Hyderabad, Bangalore and New Delhi. We are carrying out research and development specific to cyber security,” says V K Saraswat, Chief of DRDO. He also highlighted the need for India to build systems that “are robust platforms, platforms which can be trusted”.

With the cyber criminals shifting their focus to social networking sites, the art and craft of hacking has become quite sophisticated and complex. Hackers have started using social networks to mount attacks on vulnerable targets. US government sources in Washington reveal that the networks of the Department of Defence (DOD) are probed millions of times every day. A number of foreign intelligence agencies have attempted to penetrate DOD networks or those of the major military contractors including Lockheed Martin, say security sources in Washington.

In the past, New Delhi did suspect the hands of cyber spies based in mainland China for penetrating information networks belonging to various wings of the Indian defence forces as well as computer systems operated by various agencies of the Indian government and diplomatic missions across the world. As pointed out by a report in the New York Times, “the intruders pilfered classified and restricted information from the highest level of the Indian defence ministry. Incidentally, a string of cyber attacks ahead of the Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi last year were traced to China-based addresses. In June, this year, China-based hackers were linked to attacks on the Google accounts of several “dissidents and activists”.

A report brought out by the US reveals that the Beijing government is going ahead with a well-oiled plan to develop a full fledged cyber warfare division. Irked by the widespread allegations of Chinese cyber spies stealing data from the international networks, a recent report released in Beijing claims that at least half of the estimated half a million cyber attacks on the websites of the Chinese government and other agencies “originated from abroad, particularly the US and India”. The Chinese Government consistently denies the involvement of the Government in Beijing in the cyber-spying endeavour based in mainland China.

Radhakrishna Rao is a freelancer specializing in defence and aerospace issues

(The views expressed in the article are that of the author and do not represent the views of the editorial committee or the centre for land warfare studies).