Indian Navy creates exclusive cyber warriors cadre

With cyber terrorism on the rise and the fight against it getting acute, the Indian Navy will soon have an exclusive cadre of cyber warriors to combat the menace and to counter the ubiquitous attacks of hostile hackers.

For the purpose, the Indian Navy has set in motion the process of recruiting its first batch of dedicated officers for information technology who would work at creating networks for the maritime force, man the networks and maintain the systems. The navy thus becomes the first of the Indian armed forces to create such a cadre of officers from among its executive branch, instead of the technical branch.

It is now looking at recruiting engineering, information technology and computer science graduates as short service commissioned officers for whom the training will begin in December.

Unfortunately, for women who may be interested in such a career, the  navy's cyber warrior cadre, as of now, will be only an all-men affair. Only about two months ago, the navy had created a separate cell for communications, space and network centric operations (CS&NCO) under a rear admiral-rank officer, who would function as the assistant chief of naval staff (CS&NCO).

Though not a direct reason for setting up this exclusive information technology cadre, the Indian Navy had faced one of its worst cyber attacks on its Eastern Command headquartered at Visakhapatnam when a pen drive used by some of its officers had led to sensitive, secret information being passed on to China due to a malware in the device.

The navy had set up a probe into the role of six of its officers for breaching the cyber security protocol at Visakhapatnam.