Source: Indrajit Basu | Asia Times
KOLKATA – It’s reminiscent of an action movie. The year is 2017 and two rival countries – India and China – are fighting a war. The conflict is not being fought with guns, tanks and aircraft but computers, bots, viruses and Trojans. The soldiers are not troops, but hackers.
The scenario was enacted by the Indian military last year in a cyber-warfare simulation called the “Divine Matrix“. Officially, the likelihood of a Chinese cyber-strike has since been played down. This is a big mistake, experts say, given the poor state of India’s cyber-security.
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Greg Walton, one of the researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto that created a sensation last year by discovering the existence of GhostNet, a global cyber-spy network that allegedly originated in China, said India was particularly vulnerable.
“If you look at the statistics of the institutions or the targets that were attacked by GhostNet when it attacked global systems, India was by far the hardest hit by that operation,” he said. “India is a software superpower yet for some reason the country can’t seem to get its cyber-security act together.”
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“But above all”, said Walton, “even if government and specific security agencies are wake up to the threats of information warfare, the country’s corporate sector is still oblivious. It is time that this sector wakes up too.”