30 April 2017

India needs to fight not ban Pakistan’s cyber war


Pakistan has unleashed a cyber war against India on social media, and India needs to respond quickly and effectively, not by banning but by countering the enemy thrusts.

Organizing stone pelters through WhatsApp groups to help terrorists is only one part of the story. Over 1000 videos supporting Jehad in Kashmir have been created and several thousand anti India posts in social media have been shared in the last six months.

They are both soft toned as well as radical videos, some arousing sympathy for victims, others arousing hatred against armed forces.

The cyber war on social media

The videos and posts are roughly positioned around the slogans we heard last year in JNU of “Kashmir Mange Azadi, Bastar Mange Azadi” and have been part of the the biggest organized cyber war being conducted against India, by neighboring nation Pakistan.

The hacking of the IIT Delhi, IIT BHU and DU websites with Pakistan Zindabad slogans, the intelligence failure to detect the attack on the CRPF battalion at Chattisgarh are all part of this cyber war. Attacks on Banks and other public sector Institutions are expected to happen as next moves in this cyber warfare.

In December 2016 we had in this blog warned that 2017 will be a year of Cyberwar’s. The reason was because jihadists across the world were training tens and thousands of followers in cyber warfare. As we in India were pre-occupied with demonetization during November 2016 and the world was transfixed with the unexpected win of Donald Trump, Iran placed digital bombs that exploded to disrupt the Saudi Banking system in a series of cyber attacks last November.

The cyber wars between the two nations have been escalating ever since 2012 when the Shamoon malware destroyed 35,000 computer systems with a digital bomb in Saudi Aramco the world’s largest oil producer.

Bring in private sector for cyber defense

The cyber war against India is on the social media, similar to that conducted during the Arab Springs. Then it was the Al Queda and Muslim Brotherhoods that were trained by NATO and the western NGO’s. Now the IS and the ISI has developed in-house expertise. The three pronged attacks against India includes create sympathy strategy, create hostility strategy, and create insurgency strategy. It has co-opted a large number of Indians sympathetic to the ultra left actively helping the movement to create unrest and agitation within the nation.

Banning Internet or social media in Kashmir is counter productive, because the only news the people get in its absence is the text messages and videos being circulated by the enemy unofficially.

With India’s great soft power skills and dominant software companies in telecom services, India needs to quickly bring in the private sector to fight this battle. While private sector participation in creating heavy artillery can be time consuming, invoking their technology skills and scalability to fight cyber wars can be quick.

They can provide a comprehensive solution to not only defend India, create a social media counter strategy but also attack Pakistan army, ISI, Laskar and Al Queda communication networks and throw them in disarray.

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