Many know Shashi Tharoor MP as the most active politician from Kerala on social networking sites. The Internet-savvy politician enticed the audience at Cocon-2012, the International Cyber Security and Policing Conference, with his insightful speech about the cyber world and cyber-related crimes.
“Among the four different types of threats to cyber space as pointed out by international theorist Joseph Nye, the most dramatic and, perhaps, the most forbidding in its potential is Cyber War. This is essentially the unauthorised invasion by a government into the systems or networks of another government or state. This could be done either to disrupt those systems, to damage them partially, or to destroy them entirely.
‘’More crucially, they are meant to slow down, if not curtail, the military systems of the subject state. The bombs and missiles with all their explosive capabilities will merely stay put while the government scrambles to rise from its unexpected debilitation,” said Tharoor.
He also pointed out that it is not always the governments who do the hacking, but private hackers have certainly done so, possibly commissioned by higher authorities. “For five whole years, hackers had access to 70 government and private agencies around the world as they secreted away gigabytes of confidential information, unbeknown to those at the receiving end. Forty-nine infected networks were in the United States alone, but the rest included India, South Korea, Taiwan and a number of other countries,’’ Tharoor said.
He also brought to the attention of the audience many aspects of Cyber Terrorism and said that they included the insidious use of the Internet such as websites spreading extremist propaganda, recruiting terrorists, planning attacks and promoting terrorists and political and social objectives.
“Today, there are more than 2 billion people online, who need to be protected. Cyber attacks are already happening on a daily basis in the world and as we grow more and more ‘connected’, the threats also become more complex and difficult. On Facebook, there are 50 million Indian users and even if a small fraction of them click unsuspectingly on a malevolent but seemingly ordinary link, you have that many computers opened up to risk and infection,” the MP said, and added that the freedom of cyber space is just as crucial to the debate as its protection is.
Earlier, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy inaugurated the conference. Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishan and Minister for Industries and IT P K Kunhalikutty were among those who spoke. The conference will conclude on Saturday.
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