State Of CyberSecurity In India(Week 10)
State Of Cybersecurity In India
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]
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.
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
Sources:
- https://www.wired.com/2012/02/feb-15-1995-mitnick-arrested/ [1]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick [2]
- https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/E-SPEAIT_T10_Security [3]
- https://www.financialexpress.com/defence/indias-tryst-with-a-new-national-cyber-security-policy-heres-what-we-need/2304053/[4]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_breaches_in_India#:~:text=Air%20India%20data%20breach,-Main%20article%3A%202021&text=On%2021%20May%202021%2C%20it,dates%2C%20name%20and%20ticket%20information.
- https://www.icwa.in/show_content.php?lang=1&level=3&ls_id=6172&lid=4236 [5]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar [6]
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