India is at digital war: We need cybersecurity commandos to bring down hackers

Keep the early September  Uri attacks  in mind. Now, there are three questions. First question: Are we a nation of nice guys, a bunch of softies who will hold our punches no matter what the provocation? Second question: Will we keep twiddling our thumbs as our national assets and people are attacked mercilessly day in and day out? Third question: Are we so weak that we cannot teach the mischief makers a ‘propah’ lesson? [caption id=“attachment_3035408” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Thinkstock[/caption] With the exception of sundry yeas here and there, most of us would shout out an unqualified and a resounding no to the three questions. There is a long and credible track record to prove that while the Indian State is patient, as one would expect from a system infused with a democratic DNA, it can hit hard, fast, with precision and decisiveness when pushed over a tipping point.  The late September surgical strikes proved that. It took just about  three weeks for India to hit back . Keep the October  cyber attacks on banks  in mind. “What attacks?” would be a common response. Sometime in the middle of October, about three weeks after the surgical strikes, State Bank of India and Axis Bank were over-run by cyber attackers. Ostensibly it was a malware attack, but people in the know saw in the attack patterns that could only be organised by a determined group of hackers backed by a State entity. Over 1 million accounts were compromised, and SBI had to reissue debit cards to more than 600,000 Indians. To project the magnitude of the attack in the real world, it’s akin to groups of fidayeen terrorists overrunning hundreds of SBI and Axis Bank branches, guns blazing and taking down vault after vault. Now, I want to ask the same three questions… Read the full story here The author is a consulting editor at Firstpost and author of five books. His sixth book Notes of Digital Gypsy: Decoding the Other India is slated for release next year