While the world braces for e-threats, India moves slow

After the first four "real'' battlefields of land, air, sea and now increasingly space, India needs to get very serious about the virtual front as well. The country should begin planning a full-fledged military cyber command, instead of the current piecemeal and disjointed steps to bolster cyber-security, grappling as it already is with incessant online espionage and other attacks from China, Pakistan and others.

This was the clear takeaway from the deliberations on cyber-security and cyber-warfare in the high-profile Munich Security Conference on Sunday, even though India hardly figured in the discussions.

Experts said the emergence of "cyber-weapons'' like the Stuxnet software 'worm' that was used to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme over a year ago, had changed the entire security ballgame, almost on par with the use of nuclear bombs for the first time in 1945.

"Someone used a cyber-weapon in peacetime to physically destroy what the nation (Iran) would describe as its critical infrastructure. It was a new class of weapon that caused a thousand centrifuges in Iran to self-destruct,'' said General (retd) Michael V Hayden, former director of the American CIA and National Security Agency.
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