The recent ransomware assault across many countries is a serious wake-up call
The recent cyber attack on institutions across the world highlights the dramatic risks of our digital life. While some Indian companies and institutions have been impacted, notably Maharashtra Police, on the whole it appears that India’s critical economic infrastructure has been spared. This may not always be the case, however. Even though the Narendra Modi Government’s Digital India programme is laudable, the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack is just a taste of what might happen if the often outdated digital infrastructure that is supporting this initiative, is not immediately updated. It is also a warning shot that future wars will not necessarily involve armour and infantry alone; targeted cyber-attacks too can paralyse an enemy nation. India must move quickly to assess the threat to its digital infrastructure, and while this should involve civilian bodies such as the Reserve Bank of India, it must engage security agencies and the military as well. Any debilitating future digital attack on Indian financial institutions has to be considered as being akin to a declaration of war. The attack on Britain’s National Health Service, Spain’s leading telecom service provider and Germany’s main railway company, proves how damaging cyber crime can be. While things have not stopped, operations in all these core organisations have been deeply impacted and have slowed down dramatically, at the very least. The next attack could well shut down operations. Imagine what could happen if Indian Railways’ digital infrastructure were attackedIJ Trains would come to a standstill across the country, giving India an economic heart attack.
The scale and scope of the recent cyber assault will probably lead global police forces to work together and pin down the criminals involved, but hundreds of small-scale ransomware attacks are taking place all the time and many police forces are painfully unaware of how to deal with such problems. And while the Information Technology Act was promulgated to deal with online harassment and abuse, there are no provisions in the law to deal with online ransom attacks. However, coming up with new laws can wait until India builds a task-force that can assist Indian companies and institutions in building the appropriate security systems.
India must also move both in the multilateral fora and internally to act against organised crime. Many digital attacks enabled by cryptocurrency such as BitCoin are clearly a new business arm of global organised crime and potentially hackers from rogue states. Organised crime is already running rampant on the deep internet, the so called ‘dark web’ where sexual trafficking and drug trading is happening under the nose of enforcement agencies across the world. The United States and European police forces have occasionally shut down some websites such as ‘the Silk Road’, which was a fairly well-known website dealing in drugs. The dark web remains a place where digital criminals can deal in financial crime such as buying and selling credit card information, as well as trading in computer exploits and thus holding companies to ransom by encrypting their files — as had happened this past weekend.