the days when lives were lost in millions due to international conflict. Today, wars are instrumented using not guns and troops, but PCs.
The silent cyber wars of the 21st century are brewed inside homes, initiated by civilians and won by intellect, not instruments of destruction. This new found method – through which victory is calculated using hacks – has given birth to a fresh range of soldiers – to be one all you need is an internet connection and a pinch of patriotism.
With everything gone digital and the alarming rate of cyber crimes, device and data security take the centre stage. India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the government’s apex watchdog against cyber attacks, had instructed banks to be on heightened alert as recently even as a malware infection was spreading through their networks and spawning the country’s biggest known breach of financial data was the latest instance in this series.
The malware infection put 3.2 million debit cards at risk, although the loss — through unauthorised withdrawals across the world — has been pegged at a relatively minor Rs 1.3 crore by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The government and the Reserve Bank of India have ordered banks and payment gateways to investigate the breach amid concerns that faster, concerted action could have limited the extent of the attack. The suspected security breach happened through a malware in the systems of Hitachi Payments Services, which serves ATM network of Yes Bank.
In the wake of these targeted attacks, a lot needs to be done by us to win the cyber war. Hackers can get away with anything due to geographical shrinking. The internet was first used to convert and radicalise people online. Now it is used to spread cyber terrorism, which hurts the economy, affects businesses, disrupts services and facilitates extortion and blackmail.
Countries are deploying cyber warriors to attack vital organisations in other (enemy) countries is nothing new. Many countries have deployed cyber warriors by providing them with immunity from the consequences. The most vulnerable industries are banking, finance, energy, oil, electric power production and supply sector and nuclear power, and of course defence.
Cyber-espionage has been the single greatest threat in recent years and this can be expected to continue over the coming days. Cyber-criminals will continue working to improve methods to attack organizations and companies, as well as making them more difficult to detect. Online crime, espionage, sabotage and subversion—are not going to disappear. Nor is the temptation for governments to treat the internet as a new combat zone, alongside land, sea, air and space.
Crime-fighting is a better analogy than warfare. This is a useful idea. Police are needed to go after criminals, but people can help prevent crimes in the first place by taking sensible precautions. We have to fine tune our protection mechanisms and develop robust contrivances to safeguard against such attacks. Also to spend resources to upgrade our technology. A security audit needs to be done regularly by a third/neutral party. An internal team can conduct an investigation to find the people behind such attacks (if any,) which will eventually strengthen our arms to safeguard our vital corporate data.