Page 17 - Cyber Warnings

Cyber Tension in South Asian Countries

By Jatin Sethi (Assistant Professor, Department of Cyber Platform, UPES Dehradun, India) &
Vatsal Jain (Student, UPES Dehradun, India)

Introduction

The tension between India and Pakistan across the Line of Control (LoC) has crossed the
geographical boundaries and is now reflecting in the cyber space. After the recent terrorist
attack in India and the military actions between these two countries in September 2016, all other
countries around the globe were worried about the critical situation. But most of us were not
expecting that this will reflect in cyber space. From a long time we have started talking about
Cyber War, now and then it is being said that World War 3 will be majorly a cyber war. Richard
A. Clarke and Robert Kane have defined “cyberwarfare" as "actions by a nation-state to
penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage
or disruption" in their book titled as Cyber War - The Next Threat to National Security and
What to Do About It. So it could be stated that present condition is not cyber war but yes it could
be called as cyber tension definitely.

Many reputed newspapers (offline and e-newspapers) have mentioned that various cyber-
attacks have been performed by both the countries in past one month. One major point which
has been missed is that there is also a chance that lots of other disturbing attributes may have
participated in between which may not be from India or Pakistan but will make this situation
more vulnerable and misguiding. But let’s clear the objective of this article; it will not be focusing
on the political tension between these countries, neither to prove the existence of these attacks,
because it is not about these two countries only but also every nation should understand
the common cyber threats, their impacts and how to prevent from them. Hence this article
will be focusing on:

• Targeted Sectors

• Types of attacks which have been observed in past few days

• Impact of these attacks

• Preventive measures to be taken

As per very reputed news agencies it has been mentioned that in total in past one month
approximately there were more than 20000 victims. The major attacks were observed on the
assets of educational organizations, government organizations and IT firms.

The types of attack that have surfaced up till now are mainly website defacement and system
locking using popular ransomware techniques. The snapshots of the websites during these
attacks are available all over the internet which includes flags of the countries, some abusive
messages, threatening messages etc., hence could not be included here.
17 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine November 2016 Edition
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