World war 3
Today, Kushal Bhaiya mailed me about a news that he saw on the internet
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6258977.cms
This made me remember a short documentary kinda film I had seen some years ago on cyber crime and role of cyberspace in future. Then I remembered about a rumor I had once heard about some cool programmer being taken from his college by the government to hack into enemy defence networks… At that time, I thought that the person spreading the “rumor” was trying to be cool by passing out fake information. But now when I see this article and the way the whole world is moving in the cyber domain. For example, almost all banks, telecom companies, postal and railways in India now have a core server managing most of the traffic and data. though this helps in much more co-ordinated and sped-up process, this also makes us more vulnerable to any attacks as the security of the few central servers doesnt have the same importance of data:security ratio as the securities that each individual had within its own server.
Let me put it this way, say you have a new company transporting something precious, say gold, from one part of India to another, say from Kolkata to Mumbai. That involves 10 security personnel guarding it for a caravan of 5 vans full of gold. Which makes it 2 people per van. Say this policy holds good and the smaller transporters who had been robbed and had to face huge losses died out. Local traders start putting their gold in this Transport company. Eventually with more and more gold coming up, number of vans will increase much more say at some point it reaches 30 vans. Obviously, security of the caravan will also go up, they increase the number of security personnel to 30 and give them new weapons to protect the vans. The people per van ratio cannot be said to be 1 per van as they now have better weapons but the efficiency of a person guarding the van never doubles with more weapons. And even if it equalled 2 per van, we fail to consider a lot of things.
The people who used to loot small batches and stayed content arent getting that simple and regular supply of money will surely come up with something. With more security their number will come down but will never come down to zero.
We have a new vulnerability with more gold going together which will make the loot worth it for more planned.
With the whole gold business between Kolkata and Mumbai having a single channel, this loot can cripple the business on both ends.
What would you do if you got the soft spot of your blood enemy? Let go?
Take that example in terms of the ratio of importance of some information to its security. We have a much less secure system than what we had when we used thin distributed channels instead of a single fat one. With cyber armies coming up, we will have more training and idea sharing, legally between hackers of different kinds under the same roof. If you are having trouble understanding this, see this TED video http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html . With this kinda culture, it wont take long before people start realizing that you donot need huge armies to defeat and take over a nation, all you need is a few good hackers, a few people who can gain access to all the important networks in a country. It can be as simple as pushing in batches of 10-15 people for all networks within a country, pushing them to remote areas so that gaining access if simpler with bribing. Kill its economy by disturbing the railways and banks wherever you can find them off guard and while the country recovers and figures out whats going on, carry out a planned raid on it.
We donot pay as much attention to security on economic centers as we do to our borders. We really need to get out of the mindset where we considered geographical borders as the places where can be infiltrated and taken down, that concept,like any religion, is too old to hold true in the present society
