OUTSMARTING THE HACKER ARMY

THE CYBER ASSETS IN VITAL SECTORS FACED CONCERTED ATTACKS BY HACKERS FROM PAKISTAN AND OTHER NATIONS BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER OPERATION SINDOOR. ALMOST ALL WERE REPULSED, BUT INDIA CANNOT LET ITS GUARD DOWN

- PRADIP R. SAGAR

Twenty-first century warfare isn't limited to ground, air and naval forces. With vital domains like defence, finance and communications dependent on sets of interconnected information systems on the internet, attacking these can grievously impair a nation's war-making capabilities. Cyber warfare has thus emerged as a low-cost weapon of modern conflict and cyber security is now an important factor in the national security matrix of every state. As in Russia's war on Ukraine and the recent Israel-Iran war, this whole spectrum played out during the recent face-off between India and Pakistan.

Starting from the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 and continuing through Operation Sindoor and the four-day conflict between the two neighbours (May 7-10), India faced an unrelenting wave of cyberattacks, primarily by Pakistani groups backed by Islamabad and Beijing, but also from hacker groups in Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia and West Asian countries. According to Indian government sources, these groups launched over 1.5 million cyber attacks targeting a wide swathe of India's critical infrastructure spanning defence, power, telecom, finance and transportation during this period. In a cabinet meeting in early June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put the number of attacks at 100 million.