Taking on terrorism with state-of-the-art technology
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It may be possible to stay one jump ahead in the deadly game
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— courtesy Symantec
Skullduggery: Cyber fraud has its own complex ‘food chain’.
Satellite navigators to make illegal landfall on the Indian coast; Global Positioning System (GPS) systems to pin point targeted installations; GPRS–enabled mobile phones, suspected to be Blackberries or similar handsets, to exchange emailed instructions; secure satellite telephones to make crucial exchanges virtually undetectable…the full extent of the technological muscle deployed by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week, is only now unravelling.
Ironically, many of these technologies are precisely the ones that have been hailed as removing the last remaining barriers to empowering the world’s citizens and making every one of them a member of the new ‘connected’ planet. Mobile phones are so ubiquitous that even with the stringent rules in place in India that establish the antecedents of every cellular SIM owner, it is virtually impossible to trace every user.
The London example
That is not to say that civilized society cannot respond, fighting technology with technology — and hopefully staying one jump ahead of the bad guys.
London is now held out as an example of a city where surveillance systems are deployed on a massive scale in public places. Exploiting the Internet Protocol — and an array of new semiconductor offerings from players like Texas Instruments and Freescale — has made it possible to come up with highly cost effective video surveillance systems, which multiplex each video channel up to four times, even while canny storage solutions and compression algorithms, reduce the massive data overhead.
Indian designers like Ittiam, eInfochips and eCon Infotech have come up with canny systems that can be usefully deployed as part of a ‘desi’ solution to the large scale surveillance that will inevitably become necessary as a fallout of the Mumbai tragedy. Having captured vast quantities of public imagery, its analysis, checking against a data base of known suspects is the next challenge — one where face recognition techniques are being tried out. As yet a work in progress, face recognition might yet be the agni asthra that will stop terrorists in their tracks well before they can do damage.
Security agencies worldwide are increasingly called upon to monitor the electronic environment hoping to intercept conversations that might give away plans of terrorists. In recent years, specialist players like Basis Technology Corporation and Content Analyst Company, both based in the U.S., have harnessed natural language processing technology and content analytical tools to identify linguistic and location-specific features buried in unstructured text.
This will be of great value, automating to some degree the job of monitoring agencies, and making it easy to latch on to certain key phrases.
Rich tradition
With the rich tradition in natural language processing which was centred around IIT Madras and CDAC for many years, it should be possible to create a meaningful Indian technology response to the urgent need that has now arisen in this sphere.
That the Web itself is a deadly playground whose criminal elements could well wreak a ‘virtual’ mayhem to match the Mumbai tragedy was chillingly brought out last week by Net Security player Symantec. The company released the first ever Report on the Underground Economy. “The underground economy is geographically diverse and has the potential to generate billions of dollars for cyber criminals” says the report.
There is a fraud ‘food chain’ out there in Cyberia, with spammers, phishers, Bot-herders ( hackers who control a large numbers of bots or infected computers), and egg drop or dead drop servers ( where phishers stash the victims’ information) interlinked in a deadly embrace of innocent users.
The total value
The total value of advertised (stolen) goods in the underground Internet was over $ 276 million between July 2007 and June 2008, estimates Symantec.
Even more alarming, the tools to perform such malicious acts are dirt cheap — ranging from $ 225 for a Botnet (collection of compromised computers) to less than $ 10 to operate someone’s computer illegally. Over 1,000 unique attacks on Indian banks were detected during the reported period, and India ranks in the world’s top ten for generating spam. Over 200 Indian websites have seen criminals compromise their domains.
Still insensitive
Most X Ray scanning systems used in airports and other public places are still insensitive to certain types of non-nitrate explosive material. That explains the worldwide caution and restriction on gels and liquids carried by passengers.
But scientists think Raman Spectroscopy — using laser-based optical technology rather than XRays — might provide a viable and more foolproof alternative.
This uses the fact that every chemical has a unique Raman signature almost like a finger print and can be used to swiftly determine the chemical nature of a suspect substance.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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