Expressing grave concern about the growing threat of cyber terrorism in his opening statement at the meeting of Chief Ministers on National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) held on May 5, 2012, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated:
…there are terrorist threats in the cyber space, which is the fifth domain after land, sea, air and space. Much of our critical infrastructure lies in cyber space. Cyber crimes such as hacking, financial fraud, data theft, espionage etc. would, in certain circumstances, amount to terrorist acts. Our counter terrorism (CT) capacity must be able to meet the threats in cyber space. Since there are no boundaries in cyber space, how will the Central Government and the State Governments share the responsibility to face the threats in cyber space?
The threat of cyber terrorism is real and growing, as global and national systems become increasingly interlinked and interdependent. Indeed, speculation about the potential threat of cyber attacks has been rife since the 1980s, and Government systems across the world have been targeted from time to time, principally in marginally disruptive and vandalizing actions, variously, by politically motivated, mischievous and state backed groupings. Thus, there is no second opinion that the cyber security capabilities of India must be strengthened.
The cyber laws and cyber security trends of India 2011 by Perry4Law and Perry4Law Techno Legal Base (PTLB) has clearly showed the cyber security vulnerabilities of India. The cyber law trends of India 2012 have also projected an increased rate of cyber crimes in India and cyber attacks against India in the year 2012. These projections have now come true and India has become really vulnerable to cyber crimes and cyber attacks.
Even viruses that don’t specifically target the India, but originate abroad and then find their way here, can wreak havoc. The latest form of an assault which the world is talking about is the Flame. The latter has targeted countries like Iran (189 attacks), Isreal/Palestine (98 attacks), Sudan (32), Syria (30), Lebanon (18), Saudi Arabia (10) and Eqypt (5). In India, according to Kaspersky Lab which first discovered this piece of malware there has been one detection. Once a system is infected, Flame begins a complex set of operations, including sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard, and so on. All this data are available to the operators through the link to Flame's command-and-control servers.
Moreover, security issues in Data security, online transactions are of high concern. Statistics shows that phishing, network probing, malicious code, spam, etc have multiplied over the years.
"Such attack can be prevented provided the specialised cyber security tools are activated and updated regularly," a security analyst said. Also, use of open source computing environment like Linux can minimize such threats as do not let the malicious code to execute. Thus, to take care of such security issues developers of security tools and ethical hackers are high in demand in private as well as Govt. Sector.