Waging a war with bits and bytes

Did you know that India and Pakistan have been fighting a cyber war for more than ten years now? That the Western world, particularly USA and a handful of European nations, have been shouting themselves hoarse at every international forum for the last two years alleging cyber intrusions by China?

Welcome to cyber warfare, a kind of conflict where no blood is shed but networks bleed, websites are attacked and defaced, e-mail servers are compromised and spying software is planted in them.

The cyber war between India and Pakistan began more than a decade ago when India went nuclear in May 1998. Angry at India for destabilising the region, hacker groups from Pakistan hacked into the website of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Within weeks, Indian hackers had their revenge by defacing hundreds of websites run by the Pakistani government and its affiliates. The war continues till date.

Two years ago, Indian authorities discovered the first wave of cyber attacks by China. Discussed in hushed tones for six months, the official word from the Ministry of External affairs came out only in July 2008, and officially India was at war in ‘cyberland’ with China too.

As per the data available with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in the Ministry of Information Technology, 291 Indian websites were defaced in November 2008. A number of these sites are maintained and operated by various departments of the Union and state governments in India. Officials at the Ministry of Information Technology told DNA that nearly 300 websites are defaced on an average every month.

Just who are these hackers? Surprisingly most hackers are ordinary web-savvy citizens who take up cudgels against an ‘enemy’ and fight without any government go-ahead. Anyone who hacks websites of a foreign government or its affiliates is what is called, a ‘patriotic hacker’. The term patriotic is used because in most instances, the hackers act as per their own free will, often reacting to a tumultuous geo-political dynamic involving their country and a foreign power. Case in point: The recent attacks on Indian websites by Pakistani groups in the aftermath of the 26/11 attacks.

For patriotic hackers the first level is hacking government-run websites of the ‘enemy’ nation. Though it attracts a lot of attention, “defacing a website is the most basic form of cyber war,” says an expert who has been involved in cyber warfare for nearly five years now. Yet, people are more likely to panic on seeing their websites defaced, he admits. Real damage is inflicted when a hacker is able to break into secure and crucial networks of a country. India was exposed to this serious threat of cyber war a year ago when the Ministry of External affairs’ networks were compromised by suspected Chinese hackers.

“The mail servers maintained by the National Informatics Centre, which are the hub for all government-related email traffic were planted with spying software which copied packets of data on the servers and mailed them to undisclosed addresses.

A serious network related attack can cripple the infrastructure of the targeted country depending upon how wired — internet connected — these networks are. Chinese hackers, for instance, have been able to make inroads into the Pentagon’s secure networks prompting the USA to become the first country in the world with a cyber command. Unconfirmed reports say that the USA employs nearly 50,000 people under this command. The chief task of the command is to ward off any cyber threats and have enough knowledge about other nation’s IT infrastructure to cripple it at a moment’s notice when the need arises.

In India and its neighbours such attacks are usually carried out by groups directly or clandestinely funded by their government, since carrying them out is way too complicated for patriotic hackers.