Hacking: Indian cyber offensive poor, says experts

India has to step up on its cyber offensive to match Chinese and Pakistani hackers breaching the Indian cyber networks, says Ankit Fadia, the man who made his name as India's youngest and first certified ethical hacker.

"The Indian intelligence and military agencies regularly use Indian hackers to carry out counter offensives. However, the quantum of such work being carried out here is a lot less than it is in countries such as China and Pakistan," says Fadia.

His views gain credence following the report, Shadows in the Cloud, in which a few Canadian and American cyber-security researchers had claimed that China-based online espionage gangs have accessed classified documents from several Indian defence and security establishments.

"India stands nowhere in terms of counter offensive against the attacker's networks," says Sunny Waghela, an Ahmedabad-based ethical hacker. The government should employ hackers to do network penetration testing regularly to check whether networks and applications are vulnerable to the latest exploits or not, he says.

Waghela gives a picture of the havoc that Pakistani or Chinese hackers create. "They deface websites or download sensitive information (credit cards, databases) from vulnerable websites and put their own page in place of index page of victim."

Though Indian hackers say cyber laws in the country are good, they also believe that awareness and preparedness of the Indian government to face and fight cyber crime and cyber terrorism is quite low.

"The problem is that police officials who are supposed to enforce the cyber laws have not been trained properly. Many times when I am contacted for help, they end up asking very basic questions," says Fadia.

"Look at engineering colleges across the country. There are no courses on computer security. This is the primary reason for lack of experts in the country," Fadia says.

Defence Minister A K Antony had recently said that "cyber warfare is becoming a serious threat to security. We need to make our cyber systems as secure and as non-porous as possible."