Thursday, March 15, 2018

Cyber Threat



The days of conventional warfare are over. After attending a training course on ‘NETWORK FORENSICS’ at National Police Academy (NPA) at Hyderabad, I generated a lot of interest in the subject and started reading about it. Having a good understanding about computers, the cyber terminology didn’t sound Latin and Greek for me. I had imagined about cyber espionage through worms and viruses. But never by any stretch of imagination could I think that cyber attacks may bring a nation to a halt. Israeli attack on Syria bringing down its air defence system is a classic example. The skies of Syria looked safe and largely empty. But through cyber attack, the ground based controllers in Syria could see no targets in the air and Israel could bomb them without being caught in the radar. This is genuinely a serious stuff.

In today’s arsenal of any nation, importance of Cyber Cell/ Cyber Command cannot be rendered insignificant in comparison to Air, Navy and Army. India has just started strengthening its cyber infrastructure. However, when we compare ourselves with US, Russia, China, North Korea and Israel, we have got a lot of catching up to do. Few days back, some cyber criminal stole around Rs.5 lakhs from a businessman in Juhu, Mumbai. Most of the transactions between businesses are through email today. People, at times, don’t even meet ever and still end up doing business worth crores of rupees. This is all done through Internet. Internet is a network of networks. A person with malicious intent asked the businessman in this case through an email to make the payment to a different bank account this time. This email looked very genuine to the businessman and he responded normally the way he would respond to the normal business emails. The payment was made to this bank account. But it was not received by the target person (the actual client). Hence, FIR was lodged. This reflects how vulnerable we are in today’s world to cyber threat.

The programs of the viruses are coded in such a way that they will silently get downloaded into your system when you visit a particular website or click a particular pop-up. Some of the codes are written in such a manner that they do not even get blocked by the firewalls and anti-viruses. So we may better be more careful. Any system connected to Internet is susceptible to these vulnerabilities. It’s not that the computers that we use are all manufactured and assembled inside our own country. The Seagate hard drive is probably made by an American company in Singapore, Wireless card may be from Malaysia, design of the Mother board may be from Taiwan, Memory card may belong to Samsung in Korea, Graphic card and Keyboard from China and what not. Hence, the machines that we work on are a cusp of materials coming from different places. Thanks to Globalisation. It brings with it threats that proliferate across boundaries.

As per the Census and the population pyramid, the proportion of Youth population in India is greater to the overall strength of the folk. This youth is very tech savvy. They are excelling not only domestically but are also in high demand globally, esp. in Silicon Valley. If we train this group in the right direction and sensitize them about the vulnerabilities of cyber threat, they can become a lethal force to reckon with. And we need such a specialised force that understands the importance of the subject and have a willingness to create a counter for it. We already have many Cyber specialists in the country and a lot of work and research is already happening in the field. But a country as vast as India with such diversity cannot afford any kind of a cyber attack on a vast scale that may bring the power grid of the country to a halt; may stop the banking operations and may disrupt the overall life of an individual in the country. We should be ready with our cyber teams and with all the relevant know-how to counter any such attack.

Dark Hotel and Whaling attacks, Ransomware, TOR, Dark Web, Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Sniffing, Spoofing, BotNet, Malware, Web server attacks, DNS Server attacks, DHCP Server attacks, FTP attacks, Cloud architecture etc are certain areas which should be made a part of school curriculum. The awareness should start right from the school days.

Awareness is like the Sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.



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