Indian Strategic Studies: 12/17/16

17 December 2016

** Making data analytics work for you—instead of the other way around

By Helen Mayhew, Tamim Saleh, and Simon Williams
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Does your data have a purpose? If not, you’re spinning your wheels. Here’s how to discover one and then translate it into action.

The data-analytics revolution now under way has the potential to transform how companies organize, operate, manage talent, and create value. That’s starting to happen in a few companies—typically ones that are reaping major rewards from their data—but it’s far from the norm. There’s a simple reason: CEOs and other top executives, the only people who can drive the broader business changes needed to fully exploit advanced analytics, tend to avoid getting dragged into the esoteric “weeds.” On one level, this is understandable. The complexity of the methodologies, the increasing importance of machine learning, and the sheer scale of the data sets make it tempting for senior leaders to “leave it to the experts.”

But that’s also a mistake. Advanced data analytics is a quintessential business matter. That means the CEO and other top executives must be able to clearly articulate its purpose and then translate it into action—not just in an analytics department, but throughout the organization where the insights will be used.

** Countering Fidayeen Attacks

Vivek Chadha

There has been an upsurge in violence in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in recent years. This has been accompanied by increasing cross-border violations by Pakistan and heavy retaliation by India. The Uri terrorist attack on September 18, 2016 — directed, equipped and supported by Pakistan, led to the surgical strike by India across the Line of Control (LoC), which caught Pakistan off-guard. These were followed by repeated attempts by Islamabad to disrupt the 2003 ceasefire along the LoC and hit at targets inside J&K through orchestrated terrorist strikes. The brief analyses fidayeen attacks that have taken place during the last three years by Pakistan sponsored terrorist groups. It then delineates steps the security forces could take to counter such attacks effectively.

Understanding the Numbers

Waking the Beast: India’s Defense Reforms Under Modi

By Jeff M. Smith

Modi and Parrikar deserve credit for shaking things up, but much work remains to be done.

“India has done enough to simplify its defense procurement and other norms,” opined Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar at a speech in Washington last December. “It is time for U.S. Government and Industry to reciprocate. It is easy to blame Indian bureaucracy but in some cases, U.S. bureaucracy is much worse.’’

With all due respect to Parrikar—who has been a breath of fresh air after the paralytic reign of his predecessor, AK “Mr. No” Antony—few in Washington or Delhi would agree. Fortunately, the reforms he and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have shepherded are steering India in the right direction.

When Modi assumed office in June 2014 he inherited a sluggish Leviathan of a defense bureaucracy and a military facing large (and widening) capacity gaps. By one estimate, India’s military is “short of some 300 fighter jets, at least a dozen submarines, over 1,000 combat helicopters, seven frigates and perhaps 3,000 artillery guns.”

Why the India-Russia Relationship Works

By Aparna Pande and Hannah Thoburn

What has kept this old friendship going, well into the early 21st century?

It’s not often that you get Russian President Vladimir Putin to sing a little ditty. Yet he recently did, when asked about the state of the Russian-Indian relationship.

“Hindi Rusi bhai-bhai” (Indians and Russians are brothers) is a slogan left over from the days of Soviet and Indian friendship. Though much has changed since that time, both nations have been careful to preserve and even strengthen their cooperation. The relationship is driven by two very different sets of interests, yet it somehow has managed to persist.

India, as a postcolonial country, has a foreign policy marked by a desire for autonomy. It regularly views alliances as infringing on its independent decision-making.

During the Cold War, Indian leaders labeled this “nonalignment.” They now refer to it as “strategic autonomy.”

5 Questions Trump Should Raise about Afghanistan

Daniel R. DePetris

Are U.S. objectives realistic?

One of the more disturbing aspects of the 2016 presidential campaign — besides the name-calling, the callousness and the outright falsehoods that all of the candidates engaged in over a span of eighteen months — was the fact that nobody really spoke in concrete or detailed terms about America’s military involvement in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan were some blip on the radar screen, where the president decided to deploy a couple hundred special operations forces to assist the Afghan government with security functions, this would be understandable. But Afghanistan is about the exact opposite of a small-blip; indeed, when Americans hear the words “quagmire” or “stalemate,” Afghanistan usually comes to mind right next to Iraq.

Over the past fifteen years, the United States has devoted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives for the purpose of degrading the Taliban insurgency, defeating al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, training the Afghan national security forces and propping up the government in Kabul. As of December 11, 2016, 2,392 U.S. troops have been killed, tens of thousands have been injured and nearly $70 billion has been spent on ensuring that the Afghan army and national police are able to defend themselves against a variety of insurgent threats.

The Tangled History of the Afghanistan-India-Pakistan Triangle

By Ahmad Bilal Khalil

Kabul’s foreign policy approach has shifted between favoring India and Pakistan since the partition.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, speaking at the sixth Heart of Asia Conference in Amritsar, India, not only criticized Pakistan but, importantly, also rejected $500 million in aid from Pakistan, recently pledged at the Brussels conference in Europe.

Just after his return to the country, Ashraf Ghani went further, saying “We want dignified relations, not charity.” The Afghan president, in a fit of optimism, added, “If we are allowed [to live] peacefully we can find $500 million and if [there is peace] for five years we would be in a situation to give others $500 million.”

Ghani’s rejection marked the lowest ebb of bilateral relations between Kabul-Islamabad in the last 15 years and particularly during the rule of the National Unity Government (NUG) in Afghanistan. True, Kabul-Islamabad’s honeymoon ended long ago, and the NUG has snubbed Islamabad already since Pakistan’s failure to bring the Taliban to negotiating table for promised talks in March 2015 and later in March 2016. However, Ghani’s latest remarks are the first time in the last 15 years that Kabul has rejected a nation’s aid.

China Belching Fire - Signaling or Insecure?

By Lt Gen Prakash Katoch

After China tested the simultaneous launch of 10 x DF-21 missiles in a single salvo during November 2016, a dispatch from Xinhua, China’s official news agency reported that the missiles “can destroy US Asia-Pacific bases at any time”. This is reminiscent of the Russian Ambassador to India addressing the National Defence College Course at New Delhi in year 2000 that Russia still had enough “nukes to destroy the earth 65 times”. Boy this is real scary, but aren’t we forgetting the term called ‘mutually assured destruction’?

…China is a class apart in such matters; be it blatant nuclear proliferation, violating the rules of NSG and yet playing global policeman, or stockpiling chemical and biological and chemical weapons despite being signatory to various conventions or treaties.

Before trumpeting the capability to destroy US bases in Asia-Pacific, did Xinhua or those behind the dispatch bother to analyze if that became the level of escalation, what part of China, especially the developed zones, would remain to see the next daylight. Surely the Chinese population is not that naïve whatever the propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC).

China and India Aren't Afraid to Use Money as a Weapon

Rishika Chauhan

While India and China publicly disapprove of economic coercion, both have used it as an instrument of statecraft.

“Major powers have to work with each other even if their interests diverge on some issues,” India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar stressed at the recently concluded India China Think-Tanks Forum in New Delhi. However, within the next few days, two articles in significant Indian and Chinese dailies seemed to have dampened the spirit of cooperation. Talking about a Chinese consignment worth $2.8 million dispatched to Nepal, a widely circulated Indian newspaper said that the shipment “will severely hit Indian businesses.” A reporter at the Chinese state-run Global Times was quick to respond, insisting the move did not mean that “Chinese goods will push Indian products out of the country.” Impassioned media debates ensued.

While reports of competition between the two rising states is common, such discussions have been frequent since September of last year. Accusing India of imposing an unofficial economic blockade shortly after the promulgation of the Nepali constitution, then prime minister of Nepal K. P. Sharma Oli stepped up his country’s engagement with China. While India denied its involvement, its support of the Madhesis—the minority group protesting against the constitution and leading an economic blockade—was widely acknowledged.

Russian General: Russia Now Fields 400 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles

By Franz-Stefan Gady

Also, Russia’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile will be operational by 2019-2020, a senior officer claims.

Russia’s Strategic Missile Force (SMF) currently consists of 400 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), SMF commander, Colonel-General Sergei Karakayev told TASS News Agency on December 15. “At present, the Strategic Missile Force grouping comprises about 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads of various categories of their capacity,” Karakayev said.

Furthermore, “99 percent of launchers in the Strategic Missile Force grouping are kept in a combat-ready state,” the general added. It is not possible to verify the general’s statement independently.

Independent assessments in 2015 estimated that Russia has around 300 ICBMs deployed with a little over 1,000 warheads. According to an April 2016 estimate by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Russia deploys an estimated 307 ICBMs that can carry approximately 1040 warheads, nearly 40 percent of the country’s total strategic warheads.”

As I reported previously, the Russian government announced its intention in 2015 to add around 50 new ICBMs per year (“Russia to Add 40 New ICBMs: Should the West Be Worried?”). The discrepancy between the independent estimates cited above and Karakayev statement could indeed imply that Russia succeeded in increasing its ICBM arsenal.

Why America’s Marines Need the Amphibious Combat Vehicle Program to Counter Russia and China

Dan Goure

The U.S. military has a dilemma. Having forgone more than a generation of modernization and facing rising adversaries who are investing in modern military equipment, it has to make a choice: focus on near-term modernization, buy what is available in order to close the gap with adversaries or make a bet to hang on for another decade or two until a new generation of superior technologies is available.

The Obama Administration’s Department of Defense has been pushing something called the Third Offset Strategy intended to restore U.S. technological advantages over other powers in large part by exploiting advances in commercial information technology, computing and data management. The results of this effort won’t really be known for many years to come. It will also require spending lots of money on research and development for weapons systems that, in the end, may not pan out. What does the U.S. military do in the meantime as Russia threatens U.S. allies in Europe and China deploys weapons on its artificial islands in the South China Sea?

Putin Is Waging Information Warfare. Here’s How to Fight Back.

By MARK GALEOTTI

PRAGUE — Welcome to 21st-century conflict, more Machiavellian than military, where hacks, leaks and fake news are taking the place of planes, bombs and missiles. The Russian interference in the United States presidential election is just a taste of more to come.

How can countries protect themselves from such methods? As with nuclear weapons, deterrence is better than confrontation. The United States and its allies in the West need to find a way to discourage Russia, the leading practitioner of this kind of political warfare, from striking first.

With nuclear weapons, deterrence relies on demonstrating the possession of similar capabilities — and the will to use them. This won’t work with political warfare.

It is not as though the United States hasn’t dabbled in destabilization and disinformation campaigns. But these tactics are less likely to work in Russia, where the news media is mostly state-controlled, the security apparatus quickly stamps out political threats, and citizens have few illusions about their leaders. (For example, when the Panama Papers revealed that President Vladimir V. Putin’s cronies had secret bank accounts, most Russians simply shrugged, unsurprised.) All that such efforts would do is show Russians that Mr. Putin is right to say the West is no better than him.

Bitcoin Is Being Monitored by an Increasingly Wary U.S. Government

By Leah McGrath Goodman

On a mountainous stretch along the Orange River between South Africa and Namibia lies a small town called Orania, a homeland founded in the 1990s by white nationalists who introduced their own currency, the ora—probably the only tender in the world created exclusively for whites.

The ora, paper money pegged to the South African rand, is one of hundreds of alternative currencies issued for mainly political reasons, but many of the newer currencies are increasingly virtual—digital representations of money consisting of nothing more than computer code. Most prominent among them: bitcoin, which, like conventional currency, can be traded online, transferred, stored or exchanged for cash. But, unlike conventional currency, it lives primarily on the internet, secured by layers of computer code.

This suits bitcoin users just fine. They want a secure way to exchange money by laptop, mobile phone or email. Yet so do terrorists and criminals, whom the U.S. government worries might develop and deploy their own uncrackable virtual currencies. Newsweek has learned hundreds of experts inside the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies, as well as private-sector researchers in finance, technology and various think tanks across the country—some of them under contract with the U.S. government—are now investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America’s long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system.

Pacific Power: America’s Asian Alliances Beyond Burden-Sharing

Zack Cooper

America’s Asian allies face a predicament. Regional security threats are growing as China’s military modernization and North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs continue apace. Meanwhile, some worry that President-elect Trump’s “America first” approach to foreign policy and trade could lead to a diminished U.S. role in Asia. Facing these dual challenges, U.S. allies are asking fundamental questions about their security alignments and policies.

With the future of the U.S.-led security architecture in Asia unclear, War on the Rocks has convened experts to explore the main issues at hand, weigh possible outcomes, and issue recommendations. The essays in this series discuss these challenges from the perspective of a select group of U.S. allies and partners in Asia: Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan. The foremost question in these and other friendly capitals is how to keep the United States engaged in Asia despite growing U.S. public support for an “America first” approach.

In 1968, a B-52 Bomber Crashed (With 4 Super Lethal Nuclear Weapons Onboard That 'Exploded')

Matthew Gault

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s American bombers carrying nuclear weapons crisscrossed the globe, ready at a moment’s notice to fly into the heart of Russia and bomb it back to the stone age. Strategic Air Command — a now defunct branch of the U.S. Air Force — commanded this airborne alert force.

It was once the pride of the American military. For more than a decade, SAC bombers were no more than 15 minutes from nuking Russia. But the shifts on the bombers were long — sometimes more than 24 hours — and keeping such an alert force ready was taxing on pilots and crew.

There were many accidents.

In 1958, a B-47 carrying a nuke collided with an F-86 Sabre in the skies above Savannah, Georgia. The B-47 jettisoned its nuclear payload into the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities never recovered the bomb.

Months later, another B-47 dropped its nuke over South Carolina when a bomb technician aboard accidentally activated the emergency release. The bomb’s conventional explosives detonated and destroyed a nearby house.

Gathering Intelligence Is Dangerous. So Is Not Reading It.

By BENJAMIN HAAS

Donald J. Trump has so far chosen to receive only one intelligence briefing each week. His decision is an extraordinary departure from the practices of his predecessors who received a briefing every day, with the exception of Richard M. Nixon, who had extensive foreign policy experience before his 1968 election victory.

What’s more, Mr. Trump casually brushed off the importance of these briefings, indicating that he did not need them because he is “like, a smart person.”

Intelligence professionals know that gathering information is often hazardous work, and Mr. Trump’s cavalier attitude undermines their sense of purpose. During my former life as an Army intelligence officer, I spent a year in one of the most dangerous districts in Afghanistan — the same district that gave birth to the Taliban. Of course, Army intelligence officers do not assume the same risks as the infantry soldiers, who dodge improvised explosive devices on daily patrols. But if Mr. Trump needs to learn about the risks taken by intelligence professionals, he need look no further than the memorial walls of the C.I.A. and the Army Military Intelligence Corps.

One Month Into Demonetisation, These Are The Issues That Are Now Being Discussed

V Anantha Nageswaran

However, what is clear is that if the law of unintended consequences combined with bad planning damages the central story of currency swap, political consequences would follow

It is almost five weeks since the Indian Prime Minister announced his great monetary policy experiment. He already has a follower. Venezuela announced one recently. Not that the country (Venezuela) is a disciple that PM Modi can proudly show off! Many commentators are unwilling to wait. They want a judgement here and now – positive or negative. Reality is seldom that neat, if ever.

RBI has announced that the Specified Bank Notes of Rupees 500 and 1000 denomination (SBN) returned to its chest amounted to INR12.44 trillion. SBN as of March 2016 was INR14.18 trillion constituting 86.4 per cent of total currency in circulation. I do not know if anyone has information on the amount of SBN in circulation as of November 7 or 8, before the announcement. If not, then 87.8 per cent of the SBN in circulation has already been returned to RBI. That is staggering.

As someone wrote, perhaps, the government has underestimated the Indians’ ability to launder money. It is not a joke. It is a severe indictment of the country actually raising profound questions on its future prospects.

TAKE THESE STEPS TO CHANGE OUR ARMY

LT. GEN. H.R. MCMASTER

LT. COL. MATT RASMUSSEN

In the early 1970s, a shrinking U.S. Army with a reduced modernization budget faced the possibility of overmatch by a much larger and increasingly capable Soviet military. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Army leaders realized they had to change the way the Army developed the future force. In a retrospective 1983 Military Review article, “To Change an Army,” Gen. Donn Starry, then-commander of what was U.S. Readiness Command and the second commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, examined successful and unsuccessful efforts to change military organizations prior to World War II.

He identified four tenets associated with successful change:

Institution or mechanism to identify need for change.

Rigorous education to think logically about problems.

Continuity among the architects of change.

Rigorous trials to evaluate change.

Starry then described that over the next decade, senior Army leaders remained determined to innovate, modernize and change the service. Successive Army chiefs of staff and leaders of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command pursued training and education reforms, developed AirLand Battle Doctrine, and modernized with emphasis on the “Big 5” systems. The result was a highly proficient, modern and professional Army that provided the foundation for U.S. joint force superiority.

THE THREE MAJOR EFFECTS OF MILITARY BLOGS

MAJ. CRISPIN J. BURKE

Not long ago, the Army had a blog problem.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, then-Army chief of staff, castigated military bloggers in a 2005 memorandum, citing security risks. As if to underscore Schoomaker’s message, a 2006 cartoon published by the office of the Army’s Chief Information Officer depicted the “Insurgent of the Month” winner thanking military bloggers for leaking valuable secrets on the internet. Soon after, Army policies threatened to squash military blogs altogether as influential military bloggers went offline, including Army Capt. Matt Gallagher, whose blog later served as the basis for the war memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.

The Pentagon has since done an about-face, becoming a major social media adopter. The U.S. Army alone has millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter—a number that doesn’t include countless more fans of Army units, installations and agencies. Top Army leaders have jumped on the social media bandwagon, too; hardly a day goes by without a picture of Undersecretary Patrick J. Murphy doing pushups with cadets or Secretary Eric Fanning’s clever memes.

Blogs and social media are having a major effect on military operations, leadership and culture. Here are just three ways.

Should the United States Wage War for Friends?

Christopher A. Preble

I was honored to participate in the Soho Forum’s successful debate earlier this week in New York City concerning the question of whether, "The United States should be prepared to use force in defense of friendly nations even when not subject to the direct threat of force."

Arguing in the affirmative was the esteemed constitutional scholar Richard Epstein. I argued that the nation’s interest, not friendship, should guide the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to the use of force. Adopting the affirmative case, I explained, would lead to more war, not less. It also defies the wishes of America’s founding generation, and of Americans living today.

On the surface, the affirmative position seems like common sense. It also comports with basic human beliefs about how we interact with our fellow humans. After all, we do favors for friends all the time. We might, for example, loan a friend some money if they run into trouble. We might help friends around their house, or help them to move out of it. We might even drive them to the airport. As individuals, we should be free to make such choices with our money and time.

Future Foundry A New Strategic Approach to Military-Technical Advantage

By Ben FitzGerald, Alexandra Sander, and Jacqueline Parziale

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/future-foundry

In June 2014, the Center for a New American Security released “Creative Disruption: Technology, Strategy and the Future of the Global Defense Industry.” The paper argued that the United States military risks losing its technological advantage if the Department of Defense and its industry partners do not adapt to widely recognized strategic, technological, and business trends.

In the two years following that paper’s release, senior leaders in the DoD have sought to arrest the decline of U.S. technological superiority. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has launched high-profile innovation efforts, reaching out to Silicon Valley and creating the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) and Defense Innovation Advisory Board. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has championed the Third Offset Strategy, which seeks to maintain the United States’ ability to project power against adversaries armed with significant precision munitions capabilities. It is apparent that senior leaders understand the challenges facing the DoD, but their efforts have yet to address the systemic issues outlined in “Creative Disruption.” Empowering new organizations such as the DIUx and the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) is a positive step, but it is ultimately insufficient for the DoD to innovate exclusively outside its core bureaucracy or attempt to force new technology efforts through an outdated system.

Hackers Stole Data From More Than 1 Billion Yahoo User Accounts

Yahoo says it believes hackers stole data from more than one billion user accounts in August 2013, making it the email company’s largest data breach.

The tech company said the information stolen by hackers may have included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and security questions and answers.

The company said it believed bank account information and payment card data was not affected.

The hack revelation comes as telecom giant Verizon is proposing a $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo.

The latest disclosures come just three months after the company revealed 500 million Yahoo accounts were hacked in a separate attack.

The latest hack was discovered after law enforcement provided Yahoo with data files that a third party claimed as Yahoo user data, according to a letter sent by Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer Bob Lord to customers.

CYBERCOM evaluating cyber mission force

By: Mark Pomerleau

“There is actually a study going on right now at CYBERCOM, cyber mission force 2.0, to look at do we have it right, how should we tweak it and things of that nature,” Col. Robert “Chipper” Cole, director of Air Forces Cyber (forward), said during an event hosted by AFCEA NOVA on Dec. 13.

Because the cyber mission force is just coming on board, Cole explained, many weren’t sure what it was going to look like when it started. DoD is trying to figure out exactly how to formulate the force, he said.

“We do have a pretty sound construct as a foundation to start out from,” he said.

“We’re actually talking about an assessment and taking a look at the effectiveness again and how much in terms of mission capacity we have, so not just capability but capacity of the CMF. Since we’re actually employing it in the middle of the build, it’s kind of hard to get a real good solid assessment since we have so few teams relatively speaking that are at full operational capability and maturity,” Maj. Gen. Burke “Ed” Wilson, deputy principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense and senior military adviser for cyber, told C4ISRNET following his speech at the same event.

The Invisible Costs of Cyber Weapons

By Herb Lin

For kinetic weapons like tanks, production costs generally outweigh research and development. For cyber weapons, R&D is almost everything.

Max Smeets’ take on the cost of cyber weapons is a thoughtful piece about the economics of cyber warfare, and the article is a useful point of departure on this topic. However, a few additional points not discussed by Smeets are worth considering, and they all point in the direction of higher costs that his piece might predict.

Begin with the fact that the economics for cyber weapons usable in a military context are fundamentally different than for kinetic weapons. With the latter, military power is highly correlated with number—specifically, the number of identical units of a given weapon. One hundred tanks (with crews, logistics, etc.) provides more military power than one tank. That is, for kinetic weapons, military power accrues as the result of procurement processes.

Not so for cyber weapons. No one would argue that a nation has more cyber power in a military sense if it has 100 identical CD-ROMs with a software-based cyber weapon on it. For cyber weapons, military power accrues as the result of research and development (R&D) processes.

DDoS attacks have gone from a minor nuisance to a possible new form of global warfare

Joon Ian Wong

In September 1996 an internet service provider (ISP) in New York was taken down by a flood of traffic. Computers elsewhere on the internet, controlled by hackers, were sending it up to 150 connection requests every second, far more than it could handle. It was the internet’s first major distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack.

“In principle, most of the denial-of-service attacks we see have no solution,” a security expert, Peter Neumann of SRI International, told the New York Times at the time. “The generic problem is basically unsolvable.”

It still is. Twenty years on, DDoS attacks have increased exponentially in size, and vast swathes of the internet remain vulnerable. Experts say the proliferation of new but vulnerable connected devices, such as thermostats and security cameras, as well as the architecture of the internet itself, mean DDoS attacks will be with us for the foreseeable future. And rather than a mere annoyance that takes your favorite websites offline, they are starting to become a serious threat.

According to Arbor Networks, an internet monitoring company that also sells DDoS protection, the volume of global DDoS attacks has grown by more than 30 times between 2011 and 2014.

Govt to audit banking tech to check cyber crime

In a bid to tackle cybercrime, the central government is planning to review the Information Technology Act.

A technology infrastructure audit of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), for possible holes that could be exploited by cyber criminals, is also on the government's action plan.

The government, which plans to strengthen the computer emergency response team or CERT-In with ethical hackers who would respond to cyberattacks across the country, has directed digital payment agencies to report to CERT-in if any unusual activity is discovered on their platforms.

The IT ministry has approved setting up of CERTs in 5 states and creating 26 new posts in CERT-In.

"All digital payments agencies have been asked to report to CERT-In any unusual activity on their platforms. We are taking several measures to ensure a resilient system. We will audit the IT infrastructure of NPCI and have formed crack teams at CERT-In for immediate response," Union Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

"CITOs (chief IT officers) have been appointed in every ministry and government department. We are undertaking a massive programme to create awareness among the administrative machinery," the minister added.