State Of CyberSecurity In India(Week 10)

State Of Cybersecurity In India

                

                      img url:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/41/Flag_of_India.svg/1200px-Flag_of_India.svg.png

             

Kevin Mitnick is considered by many people around the world to be the face of hacking especially by any that have heard of his exploits. As a young child, he exploited his city’s public transportation and found a way to get free rides on buses. He rapidly got smarter and smarter with age employing more and more complicated techniques to get what he wanted[1]. At 16, he used social engineering techniques along with traditional hacking to hack into a DEC’s computer network and copied it’s software. This incident that occurred in 1979 resulted in jail time for Kevin. He had to undergo 12 months of jail time and 3 years of supervision. However, at the end of his supervision, he hacked into Pacific Bell voicemail computers after which he went into hiding for 2 and a ½ years. He is currently running Mitnick Security firms.[2]

img url:http://cdn.quotationof.com/images/kevin-mitnicks-quotes-7.jpg


Kevin Mitnick’s “Mitnick Formula” (as the itcollege states) is just a shortened phrase that is used to describe Mitnick’s thoughts on security which is that it depends a lot on the technology, training and policies. With these three factors in mind, I shall now be judging how India withstands the so called “Mitnick Test”.[3]

India has been the subject of many cybersecurity attacks the last 2 years with the onset of Covid 19 virus, which left a lot of industries to be intertwined with IT infrastructure. According to government data, India/Indian citizens have suffered 1.16 million cyber attacks in 2020 which is triple from the previous year[4] and a lot of them are speculated to be either from China or Pakistan. India ranks at 47th out of 175 countries in 2018  in a Global Cybersecurity Index [5] prepared by the ITU(International Telecommunications Union). It’s defensive capabilities have been described as weak by IISS which is why it has to go out of it’s way to form diplomatic relationships with countries that have a higher cybersecurity awareness than them, such as US and UK.

img url:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cf/Aadhaar_Logo.svg/1200px-Aadhaar_Logo.svg.png


A horrible example of how poor Indian cybersecurity can be is the Aadhar card system. The Aadhar card is a card that assigns a unique 12 digit number called “Aadhar” to each and every citizen of India. It is a way for Indian citizens to prove their identity regardless of where they travel in India. However, it has been proven time and time again that the project didn’t place enough emphasis security and privacy: Hackers have been able to leak the data on many separate occasions showing how vulnerable the system is. It is quite disappointing considering the project manager was the co-founder of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani [6].

Apart from this, another huge cyber attack in India was an incident in October of 2019 when over 1.3 million people’s credit card details credit and debit card information was being sold online to a dark web card shop called “Joker’s stash”. It was later revealed by a Singaporean company that 98% of all the card details belonged to Indian people[7].

In conclusion, even though we are one of the fastest growing countries in the world, we still have our flaws and hopefully the new generations will have the insight to fix the flaws of the old

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