Monitoring cyberspace: Tough, but must be done

N Balakrishnan

Jan 19 2015 

If you look at the creators of the Internet, the world wide web and the social media, they would never have imagined that their creations would touch every aspect of human life, the corporate world and the government, besides altering the way they interact within and between them. They also would have never imagined that the two complex worlds — the physical world that we live in and the cyber world into which we transit in and out — would become intricately intertwined. 

In the cyber world, it is impossible to distinguish the medium, the user and the computer. Hence, it becomes a cauldron of conflicts between all the actors and the task of combating it can only be accomplished with a directed international effort and cooperation, effective training and capacity building within the member-states, highly intellectually intensive dynamic policies and planning, and heavy investments.

It would require a huge investment of about Rs 6,000 crore to monitor the entire cyberspace. In the agrarian era, wealth was created by the movement of people while in the industrial era, it was generated through materials, or atoms. But in the world of information, wealth is created by the movement of photons and electrons, which is simply knowledge codified as bits and bytes. This transition to a manmade silicon-based structure makes it a complex world, and even more so when the cyber world interacts with the physical world. In the world of science, it is known as the revenge of silicon. So, all the notions of security in the physical world have been transplanted to the cyber world, namely cyber crime, cyber security, cyber terrorism and cyber espionage — all manifestations of the physical world phenomenon. 

Criminals, law-enforcement agencies and non-state and state actors have either been benefiting or suffering from the cyber world. What makes this space extremely difficult to cope with is the fact that criminals and anti-national acts are not confined to cyberspace. When you deal with a physical space, those acts are confined to that world, whereas when you deal with cyberspace, the acts are not restricted to it. 

Acts in cyberspace can instigate disasters in the physical space and vice versa. The complex enmeshing of these two worlds would remain a challenge. A mistake that we make is to consider cyberspace as another conflict zone like land, sea, air and space. Unfortunately, it has got nothing to do with any of these. It is vastly different and has invisible realms and controls, with no central authority. But it must be said to the advantage of cyberspace that it has not contributed to any significant loss of life. 

What starts off as mere fun and adventure in the cyber world soon turns into cyber crime and political and religious activism. The corporate world, activists and nations exploit such plans and industrial espionage, disruptions of social life, cyber terrorism and cyber warfare become the end products.

Power of social media

Another issue that is going to be a concern for several years is the social media. The extraordinary benefits of the social media in everyday life can’t be denied. However, it has been used extensively by terror groups for recruiting, spreading ideologies and resource collection. It has been used by cyber-war creators to distribute capsule data, distribute denial of service attack tool kits and viruses. The way bots in the cyber world communicate, the way all communication takes place, is exactly how terrorists communicate. 

This kind of a distributed communication system is impossible to defeat the conventional way. The concept of a flash mob and viral information diffusion has contributed to large-scale riots in India and abroad, and even brought down governments. It is also used by governments for propaganda, policy dissemination by political parties, by companies to market advertisements and by people from every walk of life. Social media has become a doubled-edged sword and it is believed that it may actually make all cyberspace combats that we have seen so far look pedestrian. In fact, flash mob is a very interesting and exciting topic of high-speed information diffusion. How do we combat that? The use of cyberspace should start from elementary school in a structured way, so that in the near future, we will have members of society who are aware of the perils and profits of cyberspace. It is being taught as a computer science subject while it really is a socio-technical world. It has to be taught along with social, civil and ethical responsibilities. It is vital to train people so that they understand this, and also how insecurity comes in the cyberspace through phony and pirated software and hardware. This training has to start from school. Securing cyberspace and monitoring it while training and creating awareness would improve security. The ultimate responsibility of securing the nation’s cyberspace is that of the government. Most governments do this through policies, deterrent punishment and extensive policing. 

India’s effort in creating the IT Act 2000 and its amendments, the National Cyber Security Policy, CERT-In, Data Security Council of India and guidelines to protect national critical information infrastructure are all aimed in this direction. However, in most countries, like in India, crime, security, terrorism, espionage and civil security are all looked after by different wings of the government. They do not work together. But in the cyber world, they all can converge to cause damage to any one of them. Time has come for a horizontal link that leads through and brings about a symbiotic coordination across all these wings. One should come up with systems by which one would be able to coordinate across networks without having to worry about the hierarchy.

Net challenges

Monitoring the Internet is a very difficult task, but not an impossible one. Most governments lay greater emphasis on monitoring the Internet for internal security purposes, and not for the security of the Internet itself. There is a need to design an Internet which need not be borderless. It could be confined to the Indian borders and Indian Internet. It is a great way to ensure that you are able to monitor everything that goes on the Internet, but then no one can monitor you. That is a technological challenge. Monitoring and controlling the social media is necessary if you are talking about national security. It is difficult, but must be done in a targeted way. It has become even more complicated in recent times because many tweets are machine generated. So, you have a complex system of network where humans and computers that mimic humans are reacting together. 

Identifying and controlling opinions on the Internet, either by active intervention or by monitoring, is essential for the country. One of the biggest growing concerns of the social media is its ability to create a “lone-wolf terrorist”. But the upside is enhanced research in big data analytics so companies can make profits by selling products through viral marketing and deriving structured information from unstructured data and quality research. We may not have a cyber war, but we will have infractions. Cyber crime, industrial espionage and financial losses would continue and start affecting individuals more than the state, but it is still worth living in that cyberspace.