Cyber snooping

Computer security company McAfee’s claim that a number of countries, including the US and India, and world organisations and companies were recently targets of a massive cyber attack has again highlighted a serious and invisible threat which the world has to grapple with.

Warnings about such attacks and reports of sophisticated hacking operations have appeared from time to time. Two years ago it was reported that Indian embassies in Moscow and elsewhere and even government establishments within the country had been infiltrated by electronic snoops based in China.

This time also the origin of these operations has been traced to China though the McAfee report does not explicitly name that country. Though there is a view that the scale of attacks that McAfee has reported may be an exaggeration, there is no denial of the extensive and illegal activities taking place in the cyber world. They are mainly directed at diplomatic, commercial and military centres. China has denied the imputation against it.
 
Since the entire world is connected through the computer network, intelligence gathering and attacks on targets have become much easier than in the past. Experts have conjured up visions of a cyber warfare in which the computer systems of enemy establishments are disabled and become sitting ducks for hostile operations.

Most countries have taken steps to secure their strategically important systems by separating them from the network. But it has been noted that loopholes can always be found  and hackers are often one step ahead of their targets. Last year there were reports  that the computers of Iran’s top secret nuclear programme were infiltrated by the Stuxnet virus, probably released by Israel.

It is estimated that billions of dollars worth commercially vital data may have been compromised in the five-year long operations reported by McAfee. Leakage of information in the military domain has more serious consequences. The only defence is to keep upgrading cyber security through constantly improving technologies.

There have to be consultations among governments to evolve an agreement on what is permissible and what is not in the cyber world. There is no definition now of what constitutes a hostile cyber operation. This may not be of much use in preventing a determined and resourceful enemy from carrying out undesirable operations but may be useful in taking action against individual hackers.