Cyber security under threat of foreign devices

Addressing the seventh national conference on IT in defence organised by the Computer Society of India and the Defence Research and Development of Organisation which began here on Thursday he said most of the foreign origin network infrastructure products contain trap doors and bugs leaving the cyber security vulnerable, he added.

Sharawat said that in India many deficits exists in the area of cyber security which also include testing, certification facilities, absence of human resource in cyber defence and proper legal framework. The loss caused by cyber crimes annually in the country is Rs 34,110 crore and that 29.9 million victims fell prey to it last year, he added.

Indigenous devices
He emphasised on the need to manufacture our own devices and put in place network infrastructure as there have been many instances of foreign vendors refusing to transfer knowledge and instances of foreign countries refusing to issue visas to Indian officers who want to attend conferences on cyber security.

The conference, on the theme of “Information welfare and cyber defence”, aimed at bringing all the armed forces, the Centre, intelligence agencies and academia and the IT industry on a single platform. The conference discussed the ‘state-of-the-art’ in defence weapons systems and military applications with emphasis on the role of computers and information technologies and their impact on the modern battlefield scenario.

Experts noted that technological advancements have changed the war scenario phenomenally over the past decade and had dramatically reduced the time to react.

Gathering data across the three armed forces, processing and analysing the data, taking decisions and communicating them back to the ground level forces has reduced to near real time, further reducing the time to react, they noted.