Terrorism has transformed into cyber threats at the turn of century

Avadhesh Mathur, IPS, Cabinet Secretariat - RAW

I would like to highlight 3 challenges with respect to cyber terrorism which impinges upon national security –

The character of cyber terrorism has changed. When I joined the services 42 years back, we were told that dacoity, theft or organized crimes were major threats. But within no time, at the turn of the century we found that the character of these threats has changed. With passage of time, terrorism has transformed into cyber threat. We have also seen that now newer technologies are emerging - machine intelligence, big data, robotics which we see as a boon to mankind. But at the same time, we should be aware of the challenges that these technologies might pose for us. Perhaps it is high time we started looking at these technologies.

The 2nd challenge is the invisible element. We know that the hacker who is sitting thousand miles away from us is invisible to us. In most of the cases cyber crimes are committed with the cyber criminal remotely operating everything; we have seen the US Presidential elections getting affected, a nuclear plant in Iran getting disabled and still we do not know the source of the threat.

The 3rd challenge is that of sensitization. I remember we used to visit different organizations and speak about the security of their computers. They are simple scientists who only are involved in their work. If you try to tell them these things, they won’t try to understand.