Cyber Warfare a Global Digital Weapon

Not every battle starts from ground, air or water…These days, you'll find some of the fiercest fighting going on between computer networks. The Digital Age has transformed the way weapon are been used. Digital Weapon is the new terms referred across the organization & continents.  Rather than using bullets and bombs, the warriors in these confrontations use bits and bytes flowing over the public and protected network.

Cyberwar can be defined as Leveraging the Internet for political, military, and economic espionage activities. Cyber warfare is Politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage.

Cyber warfare is a serious concern and only limited specialized skill resources are required, unlike traditional warfare where massive resources, weapon, and equipment are required. The cyber defense should be considered as the fourth arm after the army, navy and air force. Nations are spending huge investment in building young talent for establishing R&D center to defuse/activate attack. The objective is to steal sensitive information about the weapon, strategic and other information which may act as a major decision factor during the war. The reach of such attacks are more since all developed or developing countries are heavily depended on internet and attack can be initiated across the globe.

In today's scenario, many of the Government Sites are running with obsolete solution stack, Vulnerable deployment & coding practice, reactive threat management system making them prone for Cyber Attack.

Multiple cases that have been noticed for Cyber warfare between countries like US, South Korea, Pakistan, China, Israel &  India etc.

On  April 2013, Anonymous launched a cyber war against Israel. It was touted as  “the largest internet battle in history,” hitting 100,000 websites, 30,000 bank accounts, 40,000  Facebook pages and 5,000 Twitter accounts.

Indian Government Departments that have come under Repeated attacks Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of External Affairs, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and DRDO.According to official data, a total of 78 Indian government websites were hacked and 16,035 incidents related to spam, malware infection and system break-in were reported this year so far.

In India, their many agencies focused on Cyber defense are NTRO(National Technical Research Organization), National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Center and CERT.