Threat to cyberwarfare is growing, Strategies need to be developed
India was under the cyber threat scanner since long and to resolve the cyber threat issue, the government had set up an expert committee under the National Cyber Security Coordinator to look into revelations that a Chinese technology company with links to China’s government had been monitoring Indian citizens and organisations. India is not the only country concerned about such cyberattacks.
The United States (US) department of defence (DoD) last week exposed an information-stealing malware, SlothfulMedia, which they said was being used to launch cyberattacks against targets in India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Russia and Ukraine.
Cyberwarfare is a strategic competition conducted between adversaries in cyberspace. It allows countries to conduct covert operations on a large scale, cheaply, and anonymously. These latter three attributes are particularly important to understand.
Cyberwarfare is broad because it can occur in at least five different spaces — economic, societal, cultural/intellectual, military, and political.
Economically, in the US, 85% of cyberattack targets are in the private sector — small banks, for example, can face over 10,000 attacks per day.
A joint advisory warning was released by the US government agencies, that BeagleBoyz, a North Korean hacking group, has once again started robbing banks worldwide, including in India, through remote internet access to fund Kim Jong-Un’s cash-strapped regime. Societally, sowing disinformation through social media disinformation is also cyberwarfare.
Intellectual property (IP) rights are another avenue of strategic competition — in 2014, the US justice department indicted five Chinese military hackers and accused them of stealing secrets from US Steel, JP Morgan, Alcoa, Westinghouse Electrical Co., SolarWorld and United Steelworkers. Military cyberattacks are perhaps the most associated with cyberwarfare — the “Sandworm Team”, a group associated with Russian intelligence, has conducted attacks on government sectors in the US, Ukraine, Poland, and on the European Union and NATO.
Cyberwarfare is both cheap and anonymous because the nature of the game has changed radically over the past two decades. The internet is today an essential critical infrastructure. Any country that is heavily reliant on it is at a relative disadvantage — the threats range from IP theft, to small businesses, to elections, to even the electricity grid. And it is exceedingly cheap – training videos are easily available online so all that is needed is a motivated group of people with an inexpensive laptop and an internet connection.
It is also difficult to trace. A well-documented and game-changing cyberattack occurred in 2010 when a malware “Stuxnet” was released that was designed to damage Iran’s nuclear capability by making Iranian scientists and government think there were a series of internal engineering mishaps at their enrichment facility. It was a clever and sophisticated attack. Stuxnet was reported to be a result of US-Israeli collaboration and showed that governments can use malware to achieve covert intelligence objectives.
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