The Sillycon Post

India vs China: Is a cyber warfare possible?

Published on 10/07/20205 min read
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Image Credit: https://www.israelhayom.com

Recently, the tensions between India and China has escalated enormously. This was due to the attempt of Chinese soldiers to infiltrate into Indian land (Galwan valley). These tensions also resulted in a fight between soldiers which led to the demise of soldiers on both the sides. Even though the situation is getting better day-by-day on the fore-front, but the hot question is if China can damage India without even shedding blood???


Times are changing, the world is changing and along with that, the war pattern is also changing. Cyber warfare is defined as the use of technology to attack a nation, causing comparable harm to actual warfare. Cyber warfare consists many cyber attacks and each of these attacks consist of majorly four stages.


These four stages are:
  • Survey - investigating and analysing available information about the target in order to identify potential vulnerabilities.
  • Delivery - getting to the point in a system where a vulnerability can be exploited.
  • Breach - exploiting the vulnerability/vulnerabilities to gain some form of unauthorised access
  • Affect - carrying out activities within a system that achieve the attacker’s goal

cyber warfare is an emerging category of wars. Nowadays, everything we own is stored in form of data on computers, servers, databases etc. Therefore, our very existence is at stake if these data storage facilities are not secure enough. Indian IT defense systems says that cyber attacks have increased drastically in the last two months. In a big revelation, a senior government official said, “Hacking attempts originating from China are looking for information about products and raw material procurement including that for anti-Covid19 battle and policies. This is where the Chinese business interest comes in. If they know what India needs or wants to procure, Chinese companies and entities can align their supplies”. So basically, China wants to know new policies that the government is making so that China can act accordingly. Therefore, it was necessary to ban those 59 Chinese apps, but that’s not all, a lot harsher steps are needed to be taken to successfully implement the “AtmaNirbhar Bharat” movement.


So the question is that, “is a cyber warfare possible on India and can it be prevented”?
Well, the answer is YES, cyber attacks can happen and India still needs to work a lot on its defence systems so as to prevent major attacks. Lt. General (retd) D.S. Hooda said that “with critical infrastructure and military installations getting connected through the internet, the threat of cyber attacks was becoming increasingly lethal and that an emerging India was particularly at risk of such attacks.” He also mentioned that India was ranked 3rd in terms of facing a cyber warfare and was ranked 23rd when it comes to preparedness to deal with them. The Defence Cyber Agency (DCA) coordinated with National Cyber Security Advisor(NCSA) and has got around 1000 people to work with them out of Army, Air Force and Navy. The DCA uses Indian Army’s indigenously developed Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) as an operating system so as to prevent cyber attacks from other nations. DCA was the first step but we need more planning and strategies to improve our virtual infrastructure as China has already developed strong cyber warfare capacity.


The next war may well have to be fought on the internet where a country’s vital networks and infrastructure would be on target that will create bigger disruption than actual wars.

Quote of the blog:

“Why did I decide to write cyber thrillers? Because we've gone from the Cold War to the Code War.”

Thomas Waite