Inside Story Of Attacks On Our Banks, Airlines, Railways... And The Fighback

Cyberattacks by criminals and rival states like China on critical infrastructure sectors have become a major threat to national security. THE WEEK explains how India fights back by beefing up its online defences and making rapid strides in hacking techniques, cryptography, reverse engineering and forensics

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

On March 2, 2014, Ukraine woke up to a major communication blackout. Mobile phones in the former Soviet republic stopped working, the internet and power grid were down. There was panic all around. As authorities tried to figure out what was happening, Russian forces invaded the country and took over the Crimean Peninsula and the key naval base of Sevastopol. The Russian cyberattack before the actual invasion was quite debilitating, and it offered a glimpse of future military tactics. Armies are now more likely to march in only after crippling the enemy’s communication, banking, power supply and transport systems through cyberattacks.

In fact, this was nearly tried out back in 2003 by the US before it invaded Iraq. It had plans to cripple the Iraqi banking system so that Saddam Hussein would have no money to fight back. But the Pentagon decided against it at the last moment, after the CIA warned that such an attack would also cripple the European banking system which was linked to Iraq’s.

Such attacks are not, however, limited to wars and conflicts. They have become quite common, and India is one of the major victims. More than 11.5 lakh incidents of cyberattacks were tracked and reported to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in 2021. According to official estimates, ransomware attacks have increased by 120 per cent in India. Power companies, oil and gas majors, telecom vendors, restaurant chains and even diagnostic labs have been victims of cyberattacks.

On October 12, 2020, Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, was hit by a massive power outage. Train services were cancelled, water supply was affected and hospitals had to rely on generators. Commercial establishments in Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai struggled to keep their operations running until the crisis was resolved two hours later.