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Future wars

Wars have long been fought on land, in the air and at sea. Future wars, however, will be fought in the cyberspace. Cyber warfare is         “internet-based conflict involving politically motivated attacks on information and information systems. Cyber warfare attacks can disable official websites and networks, disrupt or disable essential services, steal or alter classified data, and cripple financial systems –among many other possibilities”.

Just how does cyber warfare work? An electronic army, or simply hackers, uses computers to gain unauthorised access into the computers of a target country with the objective of controlling or crippling the target country’s computer networks. That’s scary because there’s an embedded computer in almost all modern devices. Imagine an enemy country’s electronic army literally taking over our power plants, pipelines, refineries, trains, banks and even nuclear reactors.

In 2009, the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) was created and Admiral Michael Rogers is the current commander. China’s People’s Liberation Army has PLA Unit 61398. The British Army has the 77th          Brigade.        Germany       has the Computer Network Operation Unit. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards boast having “the 4th biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies.”    Russia’s cyber-warfare capability comes under the Russian signals intelligence which falls under the Federal Security Service of the     Russian Federation.

India’s Ministry of Defense has yet to approve a tri-service cyber command. The Department of Information Technology, however, has created the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team and then there’s the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Center. There is also the Indo-Israeli cyber nexus against Pakistan.

In 2009, the Indian army’s military operations directorate conducted a war game code-named ‘Divine Matrix’. In 2010,  India’s National Security Advisor drafted an offensive cyber warfare strategy that brought the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the IT Ministry, the Indian National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) on the same platform.

In 2010, online hackers, who called themselves ‘India Cyber Army’, attacked 36         Pakistan          government websites. In 2013, Indian hackers, NIGh7-Fox, defaced the Election Commission of Pakistan’s website. In retaliation, Pakistani hackers, who called themselves ‘True Cyber Army’, defaced 1,059 websites of Indian election bodies.

On September 18, 2016, militants attacked an Indian army brigade in Uri. Following that incident, there was a full-fledged cyber war between Pakistani and Indian hackers.

The top five countries with the most developed cyber-warfare capabilities are the US, China, Russia, Israel and the UK (the Pentagon has gone through a “massive expansion of its cyber capabilities, upping staff from 1,800 personnel in 2014 to 6,000 in 2016”).

The threat of cyber warfare is real. In 2010, Stuxnet, an American-Israeli malicious computer worm, brought down   Iran’s Natanz uranium plant (without         Iran    even knowing as to what was going wrong with its centrifuges). In 2012, Shamoon, an Iranian-linked worm attacked Saudi Aramco. In 2014,     North Korea          attacked Sony Pictures (in retaliation to Sony’s comedy about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un). In 2015, Chinese hackers pillaged secret details on Lockheed Martin’s F-35, the fifth-generation stealth multi-role Joint Strike Fighter. In December 2016, there was another “crippling cyber attack on critical Saudi Arabian computer infrastructure”. On December 9, US President Obama ordered a review of Russian election-related serious cyber attacks.

Pakistan        is not prepared. What we need is a cyber warfare doctrine. What we need is a national cyber security policy. What we need is a tri-service cyber agency. To be certain, we are years away from an operational integrated, unified cyber command.

The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com Twitter: @saleemfarrukh