Topic: Future of Cyber Warfare
Country: India
Delegate Name: Sasawat Prankprakma
School: Forest Hills Central High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All India position papers GLIMUN 2012 committees
With the proliferation of networked devices in the world, a new area of warfare has opened up: cyberwarfare. The fact that security was not always a high priority to the makers of these devices and the software that runs on them, thus there are widespread vulnerabilities to be exploited by both state, non-state, and "non-state" actors. A major problem actually is the blurry lines between state and non state actors. Often times, cyber attacks are committed by non-state hackers, but the hackers are not persecuted by the government, in effect allowing or even encouraging them to continue with their attacks. One of the most influential cyberattacks in recent years is Stuxnet, a US and Israel made virus that attacked Seimens Control Systems to delay Iran's nuclear program. It also became a major problem as it was spread via Windows computers and managed to infect millions of them before reaching its true target. It also caused collateral damage such as the failure of an Indian communications satellite. China has been accused of perpetrating many cyber attacks, and Japan is developing a counter-virus that detects intrusions and tries to disable their source regardless of collateral damage. Pakistan in particular has been the source of many attacks against us.
Internally, India is trying to make sure that we are secure against cyber attacks. Three agencies are working on cyber warfare to a significant extent, the NTRO, CERT-IN, and the DIA. We have a treaty with the US to work on security of networks. We attended the London Conference on Cyberspace. However, we have been falling behind on security. We have extremely vulnerable networks that are often hacked, and security culture is lacking, people fail to file the proper complaints when data gets stolen, or do not understand how important data is.
We would like to see more done to control cyberwarfare. What constitutes a cyber-attack should be clearly defined, and restrictions must be placed on their usage. There also needs to be established a guideline to what a government should do to stop non-state hackers in their own country.
