A terrifying new conflict is fast emerging. Not waged over land or air, but over smartphones. Not at our doorstep, but in our pockets.
Russian hackers disabling Ukraine’s telecom network. Hamas and Israel’s disinformation war over Gaza. Data leaks holding Saudi’s oil reserves to ransom. A cyber onslaught temporarily shutting down a US gas pipeline.
Unseen frontiers of attack – nameless, faceless, stateless. Is Digital India ready?
Lieutenant General MU Nair, who was appointed National Cybersecurity Coordinator (NCSC) in 2023, is the country’s top cyber sentinel. Against infrastructure grid breakdowns, military and financial espionage, or large-scale malware mayhem. His first order of business? Getting the country’s arsenal updated for the next generation of warfare. So, the 2013 National Cyber Security Strategy will be retired in favour of the National Cyber Security Reference Framework (NCRF), a dynamic and updated guide for both public and private institutions. Importantly, it beefs up security networks for crucial sectors such as banking, power, telecom, and healthcare.
The old iteration of war, soldier vs soldier, cut deep. Scenes of death and bloodshed scarring entire nations and its people. Cyber war, in comparison, feels distant, its many manoeuvres unfolding in a disembodied matrix. A videogame, not real world. But as tech entrenches itself in our existence, the stakes are dangerously high, sometimes life threatening. In its bombardment of Gaza, Israel used AI to pinpoint targets.
Not all cyber conflicts are political, some are just criminal. Microsoft tracks 65 trillion signals daily. The global cybercrime economy amounts to 10 trillion dollars. That’s twice India’s moonshot GDP figure. Ordinary citizens are sitting ducks for digital robbery. Last year alone, scammers stole nearly 921.59 crore rupees online across the country. Only 12.35 per cent of which was recovered.
Geopolitical brinkmanship has also transformed. As Nair says, “During the G20 meet, we had one of the largest instances of malicious traffic entering our cyber networks, looking to paralyse this global event. We had to work overtime to ensure that the meet was unhindered.” Consider that in 2022, Chinese spy hackers made several failed attempts to destabilise India’s electricity grid, as per governments sources.
For his current role, Nair will need to call on all his professional history, strategic and technical. India’s Signal Officer in Chief, who revamped the national communications network, for present-day challenges. Chief Information Officer of Defence and the Armed Forces. Chief of Staff for the northern and western fronts. Nair says national cyber security cannot exclude civilians who are the first line of defence in day-to-day battles. “We are all leaving data footprints in cyberspace,” he says. And the enemy follows close behind. In many cases, the ops cannot even be traced precisely. Rogue nations hiring mercenary hackers. Warfare, outsourced and unattributed.
As AI usage proliferates, the ethics of war are bound to blur further. Unmanned battleships. Robotic soldiers. Drones delivering missiles. Armed and autonomous. Can they distinguish between kill and collateral? Who takes the call and pulls the trigger?
At SYNAPSE, Lt Gen MU Nair spotlights India’s cybersecurity preparedness. The cyber soldiers manning our digital walls. Defending against data hacks. Sealing critical infrastructure grids. Safeguarding financial vaults and wallets. In a world of robots and reconnaissance, does war become difficult to define? Without limit – or an end in sight?