Cyber threats: Who cares & Who should I call

The Synergia Foundation along with the Government of Karnataka hosted a round table on ‘Cyber threat- ‘Who cares & Who should I call?’? on 28 June 2017.Senior bureaucrats, diplomats, academicians, CEOs and Members of Board were among the experts who took part in the roundtable. S. Khuntias, Chief Secretary, Govt. of Karnataka commenced the meeting sharing his insights on today’s ransomware attack and how companies across the world were victims to a number of virulent cyber-attacks.

The attack seems to have specifically targeted Ukranian businesses and Russia’s biggest oil company. India was also affected by these attacks with one of the country’s largest ports having to shut down for a day.

Synergia Foundation

The Foundation is a strategic think tank that works on real time primary information to pursue high quality, non-partisan research and draws on a global network of resources to offer the most comprehensive analysis and impactful solutions. Synergia conducts workshops on various topics with key stakeholders  and experts to derive insight and solutions for the issues pertinent to the society. 

Synergia had conducted a conference called, ‘Cyber 360' in 2015 which was attended by some of the finest strategic security practitioners, policy makers, media and business enterprises. They had gathered to obtain a 360-degree perspective on cyber security and a holistic understanding of evolving modern cyber threats.

Analysis

Key challenges

The key challenges that was discussed are:

• How fast are we able to detect a cyber-attack?
• Lack of international cooperation
• Servers being based abroad
• In a digitised world, the treasuries are synched and even a tax payer can access the system
• Risk of homeland security
• Protection of critical infrastructure
• How do you protect a huge terabyte of data that is with the government?

Solutions

• Setting up a state emergency response centre
• Cybercrime and building forensics
• Creating a platform to share zero day threats
• $4 billion annual loss due to cyber threats in India

Biggest Challenge

• The unavailability of skilled labour in India
• Only 62,000 cyber professionals across the country 

Recommendations

• Taxonomy of the threat
• Restoration of service
• Use of blockchains
• Early detection using AI

Assessment

Our assessment is that, the recent ransomware attack was a clear signalling, as it was very broad based. It had attacked banks, oil companies, airports, construction companies, etc. It is very critical that we focus on the signalling and try to understand what it really means.