By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram

Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy inaugurates the international seminar on cyber security in Thiruvananthapuram yesterday
India’s defence establishment is vulnerable to cyberattacks and this perception has been underscored by frequent successful invasions of Indian cyberspace, says Dr Shashi Tharoor, author, diplomat and lawmaker.
“India’s own style of dealing with cyber threats leaves much to be desired. It is relatively chaotic and there is a constant insecurity in the minds of observers that our cyber-defences are inefficient” Dr Tharoor, the former UN undersecretary, said.
“Our approach appears to have been ad hoc and piecemeal, with organisations supposed to be responsible, but without clarity on how to develop a capable system,” he said while delivering the keynote address at the International conference on cyber security organised by Kerala police here yesterday.
There are some 12 stakeholders in protecting the cyber defences of India, including the home affairs ministry, the national disaster management authority, national information board and a motley crew of others. They are together responsible for the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, which is the principal national agency, Tharoor pointed out.
“Such a large number of bosses, I would argue, is not conducive to efficiency. This is not to cast aspersions on our host, the Kerala police, who are undoubtedly doing a good job at the state level. But the national situation leaves much to be desired,” Tharoor stressed.
Quoting from the well-known international relations theorist, Joseph Nye, Tharoor said the threat that sounds most “dramatic” and “most forbidding in its potential” is cyber war, 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.
“To put it simply, there is no point having excellent missiles and weapons if the delivery systems can be paralysed,” he said.
The governments or the hackers they engage can also invade the systems of rival nations to steal sensitive information and there have been strong suspicions expressed about China doing it. These attacks are usually hard to discover and the case of Operation Shady Rat, which is the world’s biggest hacking ever, is rather phenomenal, Tharoor said.
“For five 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. Of these 49 networks were in the US alone but the rest included India, South Korea, Taiwan and a number of other countries. By the time Shady Rat was spotted, it was too late and the hackers probably congratulated themselves about how much they were able to get away with,” he pointed out.