In my last article, I had written about various cyber attacks carried out by Pakistanis after the Pahalgham attack and during Operation Sindoor. Last week, the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested an 18-year-old youth for targeting more than 50 Indian government websites for cyber attacks. This means that we also need to work on some insiders or sleeping cells inside India who are involved in cyber terrorist acts. Apart from this, in the last one month alone, more than 15 lakh Indian servers and websites were attacked by cyber attacks from servers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the Arabian Gulf and North Korea, Maharashtra DGP Cyber had said in a press interview.
Indian hackers were also not far behind, there have been a lot of cyber attacks on various Pakistani government and military websites and institutions. An interesting news story caught my attention on Twitter/X handle, which is known for cyber security news. It is about a private Indian cyber response and that too under the name Operation Cyber Shakti, cyber attacks were carried out by a group of amateur/hobbyist Indian hackers. According to that post, these hackers had compromised Pakistani prison database, Kot Addu Power Plant, National Highways and Motorway Police and Sindh Bank database, exposing all the sensitive data inside it. Also, within just 24 hours of the operation, this group had hacked more than 1000 CCTVs across Pakistan and taken down more than 700 websites. In this article, I will summarize below how India can give a cyber warfare response in the event of a war with Pakistan based on a report released by renowned cyber lawyer Prashant Mali and some other articles.
What a cyber war(Operation cyber sindoor) against Pakistan looks like :
- Pakistan uses fewer digital devices compared to India and most of its recent hardware and software systems are imported from China and earlier from Western countries, mainly the US.
- Pakistan receives a lot of help and support from countries like China, Turkey and North Korea, which have well-defined cyber warfare capabilities. In addition, Pakistan may get support from pro-Islamic and other private Islamic cyber hacker groups like the United Islamic Cyber Force (UICF).
- In the event of a war, the key and critical areas that would be affected are – power/fuel generation, storage and distribution capabilities, communication systems, mobile and central command systems and other systems like radars. Attacking these would be a major blow to Pakistan’s war fighting capability.
- India’s cyber warfare arsenal includes offensive and defensive capabilities, which unlike Pakistan has a specific focus on local development. They include advanced technologies such as Kilo Ampere Linear Injector (KALI) and other Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons, apart from software weapons, which are used to damage and destroy electronic systems.
- At the same time, India needs to strengthen its own cyber defenses and increase its resilience to protect itself from retaliatory cyber attacks by Pakistan or its external supporters. This includes strong threat detection, proactive prevention measures and effective incident response capabilities.