As leading cybersecurity experts from India, the United States and Israel took to the stage on the second day of the Security 360 conference in the city on Saturday, the consensus that emerged was that “crowdsourced” or “direct-to-home” terrorism, presently practised by the Islamic State (IS), was likely to dominate the rest of the 21st century.
M.K. Narayanan, the country’s National Security Adviser between 2005 and 2010, said more often than not, most “lone wolf attacks” on foreign soil were remotely plotted by IS handlers from thousands of miles away. “The global diffusion of IT, transport and finance networks will make the asymmetric threats by non-state actors like IS more potent. IS has been exploiting direct-to-home jihad and we will only see more of it. We will see more of cyber planners and virtual coaches,” he said.
Michael Chertoff, the second U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and served under President George W. Bush, said the time of grand strategies by powerful nation states was a thing of the past. He said it was now the age of little strategies, as terrorism has gone the crowdsourcing way. “Nation-states and their intelligence agencies may find themselves severely challenged to counter such terrorism. Local authorities and communities will be called upon to get more involved in security. Intelligence agencies cannot know what is happening in your coffee shops,” he said.
According to Mr. Narayanan, asymmetric threats are likely to cooperate and network with insurgencies, leading to considerable geographical area control. He predicted that attacks on critical infrastructure would enter the cyber warfare phase, covering nation-states and trying to cripple the defences of other countries including satellites, missiles and nuclear capabilities.
‘Harder to predict the future’
Has the ability of intelligence agencies to predict the future improved with social media as well as open and crowdsourced intelligence gathering systems? The answer is a resounding no. In fact, it has dropped, according to Uzi Arad, former chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. “The same technology that has created this benefit for agencies has also made their monitoring more difficult and complex. The subject is more elusive than ever,” he said.
Technology has always played a key role in the shifting geopolitical landscape. But today, social media and information channels have not only been decentralised but are also privatised. “The new battlefield is of ideas, news and propaganda seeking to influence mindsets. This is evident in the Russian involvement in the U.S. elections,” he said. “Diverse social processes and populism have thrown up unpredictable leaders, complicating the predictability of the future.”
Of cyberspace and cryptocurrency
They say crime does not pay, but is cyber making it pay? This was the question posed by Pindar Wong, an Internet pioneer from Hong Kong.
The use of cryptocurrency and tokens to finance terror and crime, and the difficulty to crack down on this in the cyberspace, was touched upon by many speakers. “Today we have a whopping 1,297 [types of] cryptocurrency in the world. Bitcoin is just one of them,” said Mr. Wong. And their complexity and variety are increasing exponentially. “We need to make fighting crime pay. The manufacturers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices need to be incentivised to make them safe,” he said.
At another session on cybersecurity in business, it was proposed that cybersecurity was no longer a technology problem, but a boardroom dilemma. Tobby Simon, president and founder of Synergia Foundation, said that cybersecurity was today a leadership issue in any firm, as hiring the best technology was no guarantee of safety from cyberattacks.
Ajay Nanavati, chairman of Syndicate Bank, made a candid admission that in most of the boards he is part of, the top management does not understand cybersecurity. “When people on the board do not understand [this], it follows that the resources allotted towards the issue are not adequate,” he said.
Sharing threat perception
Meanwhile, former Research and Analysis Wing chief P.K. Hormis Tharakan batted for more open sharing of intelligence, especially threat perceptions, with the public.
“We at least owe the public and need to share the threat perception to help them take precautions. At present, there is no security classification as to what can be revealed,” he said.
Mr. Tharakan later told The Hindu that making threat perceptions public should be carefully thought through (to either colour code or number the level of threat perception). “We need to lay down criteria for threat classification and the standard operating procedure (SOP) [to combat] these threats,” he said.
