Fighting cybercrime: How almost everything is at risk

Cyberwar: Cybercrime has put everything from smartphones to bank accounts to pacemakers to nuclear reactors and even national security at risk.

New-age cybercrime has crossed USD 6 trillion in revenue and damages, holding it as the number-one organized crime syndicate globally, easily overtaking crime syndicates such as narco-trafficking and counterfeiting. Have given. Incidentally, our Prime Minister envisioned India to be a US$ 5 trillion economy by 2025, a figure lower than the number of cybercrime feats that are expected to grow to US$ 10 trillion by then.

In a world where every day is a technological marvel, Internet of Things (IoT) is a welcome feature. While driverless cars, clone army of super human robots, money transfer at the click of mouse, smart home and social media obsession have revolutionized and turned the planet into an unfamiliar place in the last five years, cybercrime as a has emerged in Well funded enterprise organized. It has been appropriately called the ‘arms race of the 21st century’, where a mad rush to find zero-day (unreported) vulnerabilities and exploit them with the anonymity afforded by the Darknet or Onion Router Is.

The Internet was born in the late 1960s as ARPANET, a small network of government computers. It has been transformed into an all-pervasive and all-pervasive phenomenon. The world of cybercrime has also spread its tentacles in a big way, best illustrated by the following scenarios inspired by real cases from cyber police files: A female journalist living in a typical Mumbai studio apartment and trying to chat online. For example, she fell victim to a spear-phishing attack where a malicious code called Video Keylogger was installed on her laptop. As a result, whatever he typed – all keystrokes – was recorded in the hard-disk of his laptop and transferred to the cybercriminals via email. Even his webcam was inadvertently turned on and all images were transferred likewise. All videos and data were carefully collected and used to blackmail the gullible victim. The girl attempted suicide and was later counselled. Some teenage Chinese hackers, who probably had nothing better to do in their vacation, hacked and even attempted to change the course of NASA’s 2 satellites. The hacks were detected and thwarted with the real threat of converting satellites into weapons of mass destruction.

Pegasus, a malware developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, has gained notoriety by playing with the privacy of hundreds of smartphones. The distinguishing feature of the spyware was its ‘zero click’ feature, where it was installed on the victim’s phone and the victim was not required to click on a malicious link even once and subsequently took over all the admin controls. , thereby enabling it to monitor all communications. , Text, chat and even switch on the camera and microphone to see and hear the scenery and sounds of the surroundings.

In October 2020, massive power cuts in the Mumbai region, which brought the entire city, including its lifeline, local trains to a grinding halt, were attributed to acts of cyber-sabotage. A New York Times investigation and report revealed that 14 Trojan horses or malicious programs from hostile countries had infected Lightning servers.

Pune Cosmos Bank cyber robbery in 2018, in which hackers stole Rs 94 crore in just two days through multiple ATM swipes in 28 countries across the world and Nanded Sahakari Bank cyber theft in 2021, where Rs 14 crore was stolen . Core banking solutions are clearly depicting the horrors of robbery by hacking the system, not through bullets and bombs but through bits and bytes. Hypothetically, if such massive bank robberies were carried out in the physical world via automatic weapons, there would be no governments and a lot of heads would be rolling.

Another scary scenario of cyber crime is when it turns into cyber terrorism. Hacked railway signaling systems could cause train collisions, hacked water purification plants could lead to poisoning, hacked nuclear missile control systems could lead to rogue nuclear strikes and devastation. The primary reason why Iran is still a non-nuclear weapon nation is the iconic cyberattack on its netizen uranium enrichment centrifuges designated as ‘stuxnets’, where they spin at supersonic speeds and self-destruct. Cyber ​​terrorism is very real – a Frankenstein monster that needs to be tamed.

Thus, cybercrime has redefined the landscape. This camouflage in a hoodie is no longer permanent by the computer savvy alone. It’s trade, a parallel economy worth trillions of US dollars. It is preferred because of the low entry cost, technological advancement so fast that law enforcement agencies are not able to keep up with the pace. The risk of being caught is minimized by the techniques of proxy bouncing and the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which allow attacks originating from a country such as Iran or North Korea, which are shrouded in secrecy.

Cybercrime turns into darknet crimes with blitzkrieg speed where one can hire a contract killer or buy and sell narcotics with anonymity, ransomware where an agency’s data is secretly encrypted and Ransom is demanded in crypto currency to decrypt it, Man in the middle attack, Sextortion, Social online grooming of children, Child pornography, Jamtara style online financial fraud, Spoofing, Scamming, Skimming attacks, Phishing and Vishing attacks, Hacks or even deeply faked and deeply naked attacks on critical infrastructure by state actors. I will try to illustrate each of these aspects with real-life examples in subsequent columns. It is imperative that law enforcement agencies bring their task together and fight cyber crime in an honest and concerted manner with international cooperation and up-gradation of resources, equipment and skilled manpower.

end of article