India is a Sitting Duck in the Cyber Battlefield

Must read article on the state of Cyber readiness.

what to do boss Indian policy makers are yet to view the danger posed by cyber threats,note that when our national security advisors are themselves old fossils how can they be aware of such changes and accordingly counsel our remote controlled PM.

its a collective failure of Defence,Investigative and political stakeholders

Imagine millions of worth of defense acquisition rendered useless by computer viruses. Its a big gaping hole in the armory we have.

There is enough talent in India to thwart attacks and make rock solid defenses for all sensitive and susceptible networks. But the problem is, the goddamn babus and government machinery take years to make even small moves.

Now what these buggers will do is, they will open a new government department and recruit a few kids. They will pay salaries like 20,000 per month. And only the bottom rung will apply and get jobs here. All the bright ones will go to the IBMs and HPs and Oracles and MIcrosofts and Infosys and TCS, etc. etc. The government department will be starved of funds, and will be a giant failure, attacks will continue to increase on our networks.

The problem faced in cyber warfare is that an attacker can attack his targets piecemeal. The defenders problem is that each government entity is responsible for their own cyber safety, here lies the flaw. The security depends on the technological understanding of the person heading the entity.

India is facing cyber attacks from China on a daily basis and information is leaking out in a big way. This is a real shame when we are an aclaimed IT giant.

The National Technology Research Organisation (NTRO) should be reactivated and should be divided into a defensive theam and an assault team. If we have to launch a cyber attack today - we have zero capability in place.

All departments that come under-the Official Secrets Act should be advised by NTRO experts. With regular security audits and penalties in place for negligence.

The problem with hacking is that the attacker has all the advantages.

That is not a problem once a system has been devised. We need to make a start. Track the source of attacks map the threats and start counter-attacks against those sources.

For this particular situation the PMO should consider employing young blood, Comp. whiz kids, nationalist hackers etc. for the national cyber command and weed out old good for nothing babus who cannot even type their own emails. Just imagine if a babu who does not know shyt about internet is heading the Cyber Command....only in India such dastardly acts can happen and they keep on happening! When will these power hungry people learn to lay off when they are not capable of handling certain issues, but guess what they take the job for money and power involved, and hire consultants / outsiders to their job and then for obvious reasons inefficiency and ineptitude creeps in!

The CIA and Sony servers were supposedly hacked by a 19 year old kid and a group called LulSec. It is a rag tag bunch of people who hack only to expose security. You could call it a non profit organization.

Real hacking for profit can get really dangerous. CCIE trainers and experts get paid secretly by corporations just so they don't hack into their servers. Telecom companies like Vodafone, Airtel and even small networking companies pay 10000-20000 every month. Some get paid in Lakhs per month depending on their "capabilities."

There is only one fool proof way of securing against hacking from other countries. Cut the hardline when under attack, but we need to devise a way to detect an intrusion.

Counter attacks can be done by setting up groups of your own which can attack and assure a MAD scenario. Fact is you can set up a hacking group of our own and do the same thing as the Chinese are doing, even better if you are given Govt funding and legal protection as is the case of some Chinese groups. Every country has computer experts and ours is no different. We have plenty of such groups.
Only drawback is Internet in India is extremely slow and expensive.

the problem with indian system is that gov likes to take people who are be/btech students and above 60% and then train them for hacking which doesnt work in case hacking

Oh boy, I did'nt know that.

Well, you have brought out the above point. I'm sure guys like you with the required know how can devise some processes.

I have just started CCIE training, that's 2 years to understand networks. Then I will need to undergo hacking training, that's another 3 years with experience, tops, just so I can hack something big credibly. My brother's already a step ahead of me in this department. Who knows? Perhaps we may start a revolution. But as of today we are nothing in this department. We won't be doing anything without GOI support though.

The 19 year old from UK seems to have been baited by LulSec or some one else for ulterior motives. The kid faces 60 years in prison if extradited to the US.
Teenager Ryan Cleary charged over LulzSec hacking | Technology | The Guardian

A person in India cannot do anything like this unless GoI supports it. Such hackers simply have to call themselves ethical hackers and rely on brains in order not to get caught. They may have to move to a country with weak cyber laws if they are to carry out criminal activities like this.

DFI was under attack by Pakistani Hackers too.

These guys are our back ups if GOI fails;

INDIAN CYBER ARMY : World's First Cyber Army Dedicated Towards Nation's Cyber Space

Indian Cyber Army ~ Security is from You !

The second website is probably more secure than any of our govt websites.

After India tested nukes in 1998 a bunch of American, British and NZ hackers hacked into BARC. They did not just bring a website down, they were actually in the entire network. They literally walked in. The Hacker group is called milw0rm. They stole thousands of pages of data from BARC's servers and almost everything was classified stuff. They were all teenagers. OH! CIA then stole this information from the kids, physically or electronically we don't know.

A very important read;
www.outlookindia.com | Milworm Bites BARC

Since I do have much knowledge of these cyber attacks. Why GOI does not set up a separate department in one of the Investigative branch of Armed Forces and hire the best available talent who show tendency of nationalism(as has been mentioned by MAOMAO). They should be paid premium salary as well.

Then they could move out of their parents' house.

Living with parents is a cultural tradition as it is in some of the European countries. It is also making comeback in North America due to the state of economy. I foresee this to take hold in our society since most of the seniors prefer to stay at hoe rather than retirement homes.