Surfshark created the report in partnership with independent cybersecurity experts and used user data collected from over 27,000 breached databases that appeared online. The researchers sorted data based on specific data points like user countries. The users’ locations were ascertained using their email or website domain name, country, city, coordinates, IP address, and other data.

According to Agneska Sablovskaja, lead researcher at Surfshark, there was a 68 per cent global decline in account breaches in 2022, with countries like the United States, India and Brazil improving significantly compared to 2021. Meanwhile, Indonesia, China and Russia experienced big surges in data breaches compared to the previous year.

India ranks in the top 10

The 4.7 million email accounts in India that were breached in 2022 represent a 94 per cent decrease when compared to the previous year. This is why India moved from 3rd place to 7th place in the list of countries that suffered the most data breaches.

The biggest breach that affected users in the country was the Swacch city data breach that happened in January, where 91,800 email accounts were breached. This amounts to 2 per cent of all the breaches that happened during the year. The Flipkart and ClickASnap data breaches were also massive, being responsible for 69,700 and 44,700 account breaches, respectively.

The reduction of data breaches in India went in parallel with a global trend of reduced breaches. According to the report, there were 68 per cent fewer breached users in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Europe performed the worst

The report concludes that about 153.3 million, or half of all the breaches recorded during 2022, happened to European email accounts. This can largely be attributed to a flood of Russian data breaches. Russia witnessed a 191 per cent increase in cyber breaches compared to the previous year.

Meanwhile, Asia accounted for a quarter of all the world’s breaches with 74.2 million instances. Most of these came from China, Indonesia and India. The IndiHome breach was the biggest that happened in the region, with over 74.2 million accounts breached. Apart from Russia, the sharpest spikes in breached accounts happened in Indonesia (269 per cent) followed by Sri Lanka (204 per cent), Uzbekistan (73 per cent), and China (45 per cent).

Hackers breached Russia

According to the report, the United States was the most breached country of this decade up until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the Russian Federation has topped the charts, with one-third of all accounts leaked being from the country. The country witnessed 718 account breaches per 1,000 people, the highest such figure among all countries. To put that into context, Ukraine had 54 victims per 1,000 people last year, a 30 per cent decrease over the previous year.

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With government funding, massive computational capacity, and ties to the military, Peng Cheng Lab is likely to be actively used by state hacking teams. Notably, this cyber range, which facilitates military-civil fusion, has supercomputers, research facilities for AI, ICS, smart cars, etc. It is known to have hosted cyber competitions.

The lab is led by the Guangdonag Provincial Laboratory of Cyberspace Science and Technology and built with funding from the Guangdong provincial and Shenzhen municipal governments. It aims to provide computational power to groups conducting research on a large number of topics.

Based on the lab’s known partnerships (see below), these groups include academics, industry, and military researchers. Peng Cheng Lab enumerated areas of research extends to robotics, virtual reality, smart lasers, and “electromagnetic cognition.”

Peng Cheng Lab has built a powerful supercomputer, Cloudbrain-II Based on available data, Cloudbrain-II is estimated to be half as fast as the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku in Japan. Its most famous contribution to China’s public research so far has been the computational power it provided to train China’s PanGu large language model. Peng Cheng Lab aims to provide similar computation resources to work on cyber ranges and AI and cyber research.

Peng Cheng Lab also hosts cyber ranges for industrial control systems, smart cars, cybersecurity development, and AI. The facility’s work on industrial control systems appears aimed at securing IoT devices used to implement “smart manufacturing”—a policy goal formalized in a recent five-year plan. Smart cars, part of the electric vehicle revolution and a topic of concern in China’s Three-Year Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of the Cybersecurity Industry (2021-2023), receive their own cyber range. The Internet of Vehicles Lab is being built in concert with central government regulators under the China Automotive Technology and Research Center in Tianjin.

Peng Cheng Lab issued contracts to build its AI cyber range within months of opening in 2019. The contracts were quickly followed with public events promoting research on AI in China. The Shenzhen-based lab hosted China’s National AI Competition in late 2020, which counted leaders from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, leading Chinese universities, and private firms among its participants.

Projects focused on cybersecurity advanced just as quickly. Peng Cheng Lab hosted an inaugural conference on cyber range research in mid-2019 and has done so at least once since then. After China’s National Cybersecurity Center for Education and Innovation opened in 2020, Peng Cheng Lab began partnering with the facility. In 2021, Peng Cheng Lab joined the National Cybersecurity Center, Sichuan University, and a cybersecurity park in Qingdao in jointly hosting a cybersecurity competition. Qi An Xin Technology Group, a Chinese cybersecurity company active at the National Cybersecurity Center and one of China’s 20 “invisible champions” of national security technology, may have facilitated Peng Cheng Lab’s engagement—the company won a contract to construct Peng Cheng Lab’s AI cyber range. The lab’s rapid integration into existing cybersecurity and AI research initiatives across the country by Qi An Xin indicate it is taken seriously by other leading researchers in China. As of 2022. such cooperation appears to be organic and not centrally dictated.

The lab’s list of partners is growing rapidly. Since opening its doors in 2019, Peng Cheng Lab has formed research partnerships with other Chinese institutions. The lab partners with 21 universities, 13 research organizations, and 25 businesses or SOEs. Among the organizations participating in the initiative, prominent institutions include several of China’s premier universities, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One school tied to state-sponsored hacking campaigns and co-located on a PLA base, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, also partners with Peng Cheng Lab. Shanghai Jiao Tong University is also subject to a 2017 agreement with the PLA Strategic Support Force to develop “new combat forces.”

Likewise, China’s National University of Defense Technology and the Key Laboratory of Science and Technology for National Defense are listed among its partnerships with research organizations. The collection of collaborators reads as a who’s who of Chinese high-tech research talent. Peng Cheng Lab names entities like BGI, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, China Electronics Corporation, China Electronics Technology Group, iFlyTek, and HiSense among its corporate and defense-SOE partners. The US Department of Commerce has listed many of these businesses on its Entity List.

Of the cyber ranges discussed in this report, Peng Cheng Lab stands out for its association with Li Jianhua, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Li currently runs a PLA-affiliated lab which researches the applications of AI to cybersecurity research for both offensive and defensive purposes. His work is also featured in Robot Hacking Games, China’s version of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge.

Li is one of China’s leading experts on cyber policy. In 2018, he published an article extolling the importance of cyber ranges and offered a detailed path for successful development. Li argued that the ability to rapidly recreate networks is critically important, a capability which can facilitate attack planning. He specifically suggested the use of AI to aid both defenders in detecting intrusions and in “decision making” during range operations.

Given Li’s prominence, his involvement in Peng Cheng Lab suggests it is among the more sophisticated cyber ranges developed by China. His involvement, his school’s history of working with China’s security services, the technical capabilities of the lab, and the lab’s partnership with military institutions indicate it may be used by the PLA to practice offensive operations. Li’s institution, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is listed among the lab’s strategic partners, alongside defense-SOEs and the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology. Further, given Li’s focus on AI and ties to the security services, Peng Cheng Lab is well-situated to enable AI-aided attack planning. One possible scenario would allow offensive operators to further hone their attacks by applying machine learning to attack simulations made possible by the range.

Based on “Downrange: A Survey of China’s Cyber Ranges”, A report by Center for Security and Emerging Technology, 2022

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China is rapidly building cyber ranges that allow cybersecurity teams to test new tools, practice attack and defence, and evaluate the cybersecurity of a particular product or service. Nineteen of China’s 34 provinces are building, or have built, such facilities.

Their purposes span from academic to national defence. In short, the presence of these facilities suggests a concerted effort on the part of the government, in partnership with industry and academia, to advance technological research and upskill its cybersecurity workforce—more evidence that China has entered near-peer status in the cyber domain.

A report titled “Downrange: A Survey of China’s Cyber Ranges”, by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, published in September 2022, examines some of China’s 19 facilities that have demonstrable ties to the military or security services.

China’s investment in cyber ranges is in line with what is known about other efforts to bolster the country’s hacking and cybersecurity capabilities. As these facilities mature, network defenders who find themselves in the crosshairs of China’s hacking teams may be subject to attacks that have been rehearsed, tested, and sometimes practiced on replicas of their own networks.

Important Findings

This report finds:

1. China’s cyber ranges facilitate joint exercises between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and civilians. One competition hosted each year in Chengdu aims to replicate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Locked Shields exercise. Teams include representatives from the military, private cybersecurity firms, and critical infrastructure operators. Separately, a defence state-owned enterprise (SOE) makes a “comprehensive space scenario range” available to civilians at an annual cybersecurity competition. Each of these examples demonstrates China’s implementation of military-civil fusion in the cyber domain.

2. Some cyber ranges allow hackers to practice attacking and defending critical infrastructure systems. Some ranges provide users with training on industrial control systems within the cyber range; one of which purportedly engages in “national offensive and defensive exercises.” The Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s 2022 unclassified annual threat assessment found that China was “almost certainly […] capable of launching cyberattacks that would disrupt critical infrastructure services.” These ranges could allow rehearsals and testing of these types of attacks in the future.

3. Peng Cheng Laboratory in southern China is using a supercomputer to research artificial intelligence’s (AI) application to cybersecurity. The lab’s partners include the National University of Defense Technology, China’s Key Laboratory of Science and Technology for National Defense, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a university with ties to military hacking teams. The lab has quickly earned the respect of longtime experts in China’s cybersecurity community.

Ranges Enhance Chinese Defence

China’s cybersecurity posture will be enhanced by the use of cyber ranges in several ways. First, China’s critical infrastructure, massive data troves, and government agencies will be better defended. Cybersecurity teams with years of experience and hours of practice on a range will be better able to defend against a variety of threats. Second, China’s attacks are likely to increase in efficacy and capability. While there are no indications to date that China has launched a physically destructive or disruptive cyberattack against another country’s critical infrastructure, the ranges covered in this report suggest such a lack of action may be based in policy rather than from a lack of capabilities. Besides making attacks on industrial control systems more feasible, other types of attacks will improve as well. For example, hacking teams have more opportunities to try new tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Components of Cyber Ranges

Cyber ranges can help these agencies provide the experiential learning that hackers need. A set of virtual machines—software that creates a computer within a computer— comprise most cyber ranges. Because virtual machines are cheap software to license, a cyber range can quickly grow in size but with little additional cost. The operator can design the range to his or her needs, specifying how the machines are connected, what operating system they use, and even the range’s defences. The best cyber ranges aim to simulate real computer networks. Few achieve this high standard, and for most users “close” is good enough. The best government-funded cyber ranges can simulate millions of connections.

But cyber ranges do not only let users learn new tools, they also let them practice. Offensive teams that hope to damage or impair physical systems with precision often need to rehearse. Attacking an electrical substation or gas pipeline requires deep knowledge about the target. A cyber range built to emulate that target can help attackers make sure that they are on the right path. Industrial networks can be recreated from stolen data; AI may even help attackers understand how to attack these systems.

Background and Recent Policies

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) established China’s first national cyber range in 2010. That was China’s first publicly-acknowledged, government-led effort to establish such a facility. Some of China’s best universities, military hacking teams, and private cybersecurity firms likely already had access to cyber ranges.

Cyber ranges within China featured prominently in 2021 in two important ways. First, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began soliciting public opinions on the drafted Three-Year Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of the Cybersecurity Industry (2021-2023) in July 2021. MIIT policymakers called on the government and industry to build “AI security cyber ranges,” promote research on cyber ranges, use cyber ranges for training, and invest in cyber ranges that can be used to train defenders of China’s futuristic smart cities. MIIT frequently allocates money for research on cyber ranges, including allotments to research partnerships between universities and the PLA Strategic Support Force—the service branch responsible for computer network operations and space systems.

China issued its second policy addressing cyber ranges a few months later in October 2021. The National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, a research institute of the MIIT, published a document whose contents were only summarized publicly. In the policy document, titled “Industrial Cyber Range Platform Technology Capability Evaluation Criteria”, policymakers lay out the standards that China’s Industrial Control System cyber ranges should aspire to meet. Available summaries reference standards from companies such as Dragos, KPMG, EY, and Deloitte. What little information is publicly available stresses the close connection between industrial security and China’s future as an automated manufacturing powerhouse.

Private Sector Participation

China, like many countries, has a robust market for cyber range providers. Private sector companies sell services to universities so cybersecurity students can practice their skills. Some companies specialize in supporting critical infrastructure operators, helping electrical grid operators learn how to defend their networks. And still some companies focus on training other private sector employees. Similarly, it is well known that China’s premier military university for hackers—the PLA Information Engineering University—has a cyber range.

Potential Cyber Range Uses in China

There are a number of potential uses of cyber ranges. The following have been observed in China:

● Training on new tools and techniques in a controlled environment.

● Practicing attacking and defending industrial control systems.

● Evaluating product cybersecurity—smart cars, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, etc.

● Evaluating the efficacy of cybersecurity/antivirus products. Such evaluations can determine whether the products will detect new attack methodologies or malware. These evaluations can also help attackers evade a target’s defences. China’s military has been observed purchasing such systems.

● Recreating networks to allow defenders to practice defending those systems and attackers to practice attacking targeted systems.

● Planning attacks using attack graphs, which recreate a network and determine which pathways to a target are least likely to pique the interest of defenders. Some researchers are using an AI technique, reinforcement learning, to determine and optimize these attack paths.

● Replicating smart-city networks for defenders to practice protecting internet- connected infrastructure and surveillance systems.

Conclusion

The development of China’s cyber ranges highlights how its military-civil fusion strategy is applied to the cyber domain, leveraging academic institutions, companies and government labs/entities to work toward a central goal. These ranges not only provide the opportunity for civilian organizations and the military to practice their skills together, but they also consistently engage in national security related research in areas such as applying machine learning frameworks to software vulnerability discovery, applying AI to cyberattack and defence, and developing attack and defence methodologies for industrial control systems.

The growth of China’s cyber ranges is not accidental. Central policymakers signalled their interest in cyber ranges for education, training, AI development, and testing in China’s most recent development plan for the cybersecurity sector. Consequently, municipal and provincial governments funded the development of cyber ranges with sometimes significant subsidies in alignment with Beijing’s political mandate. Other cyber ranges included in the appendix receive similar funding across China. The decentralized approach to investment supports innovation by provincial governments and increases opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between the military and civilians.

Cyber ranges are key to training the next generation of talent to defend, and potentially attack, critical infrastructure. China—through the development of its ranges—is providing a venue for testing and exercising the tools and techniques to attack and defend critical infrastructure while developing the technical talent to execute these operations. Although no cybersecurity firms or governments have yet attributed a disruptive or destructive attack on industrial control systems to China, this report on its cyber ranges demonstrates that the PLA has the capabilities to do active research in this area and could be postured to conduct such attacks in the future. New research on Chinese procurement records and research publications shows Chinese interest in procuring the capabilities for such destructive attacks, following the 2015 attack on Ukraine’s electrical grid. China’s interest in having that capability is likely driving those requests.

As new cyber range capabilities develop and mature, the lessons learned from their use will provide more policy options to Beijing. Competition among states for influence and power in China’s near-abroad will continue to shape Beijing’s policy in the region. Besides positive incentives that induce cooperation, such as trade deals, disincentives—like potentially learning that Beijing has implanted destructive malware on your country’s electrical grids—bolster China’s ability to compel other countries.

Although the time and place of future cyber operations is hard to predict, the scope and scale of China’s operational capabilities is growing. Investment precedes capabilities, and China has invested.

Based on “Downrange: A Survey of China’s Cyber Ranges”, A report by Center for Security and Emerging Technology, 2022

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India, US, Indonesia, and China accounted for 45% of total cyberattacks on government agencies worldwide in the second half of 2022, according to a report by cybersecurity firm CloudSek, released on 30 December. The number of attacks on government agencies were up 95% year-on-year, the report claimed.

The government itself has acknowledged that 18 million cyberattacks and 200,000 online threats daily in the first quarter of 2022.

India was the most targeted country in 2022 as attacks on government agencies more than doubled. CloudSek attributed this to an increase in activities of Malaysia-based hacktivist group Dragon Force, which ran campaigns such as #OpIndia and #OpsPatuk against India in retaliation to the controversial comments by an Indian politician on Prophet Mohammed.

Another hacker group Khalifah Cyber Crew intensified attacks on India in protest against alleged “Muslim discrimination” by the government, the report said.

Attacks on government agencies in China declined to 4.5% of all attacks from 13.10% last year. On the other hand, in India, US, and Indonesia, the share of all attacks grew from 6.3% to 13.7%, 7.4% to 9.6%, and 4.6% to 9.3%, respectively.

CERT-In Data

Government data, collated by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), is available only till 2021, but that too shows an increase in cyberattacks in India.

In 2019, CERT-In handled close to 3,94,499 incidents in total, in which it suggested remedial measures for organisations and shared notes on “cyber threats and vulnerabilities”. In the same year, CERT-In issued 204 security alerts and 38 advisories.

The number of incidents handled by CERT-In surged in 2020 to 11,58,208, a near-tripling over the previous year. This surge continued in 2021, which saw 14,02,809 incidents, a 21 per cent increase.

The matters CERT-In looks into include website intrusion and malware propagation, malicious code, phishing, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, website defacements, unauthorised network scanning or probing activities, ransomware attacks, data breaches and vulnerable services.

Trends

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team said: “Threat actors were leveraging tools that are already available in the cyber environment rather than making custom tools and malwares. By this way, they were being able to bypass many security controls.”

Threat actors are also able to execute scripts that reboot victim’s machine into ‘safe mode’, and thus bypass security solutions.

In terms of mitigation, the agency recommended victims to immediately disconnect and isolate infected systems from the network. IT also recommended to turn off any wireless internet connectivity and isolate all system backups.

Spike in Ransomware Attacks in India

In a first of its kind report, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said that it had observed a 51 percent increase in ransomware incidents in the country in the first half of the business year (H1) in 2022.

The information technology sector was the most affected when it came to these attacks, CERT-In said, followed by manufacturing and finance.

CERT-In attributed the rise in attacks in India to Djvu, a ‘high-risk’ virus that majorly targets citizens. The agency also named Phobos, a ransomware which “strikes smaller companies and individuals that have less capacity to pay relative to larger businesses”, to have played a role in the increase.

It also attributed the increase to Hive, a year-old ransomware which has grown into one of the most prevalent ransomware payloads in the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) ecosystem, according to Microsoft.

“Ransomware as a Service”

A ransomware is a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) is a subscription-based model that enables affiliates to use already-developed ransomware tools to execute ransomware attacks, said Upguard, a cybersecurity company.

In the report CERT-In said, “Ransomware-As-A-Service (RAAS) ecosystem is evolving with sophisticated double and triple extortion tactics and a wide range of ransomware campaigns through affiliates.”

“This is leading to higher probability of monetization and further rise in attack campaigns. Post covid accelerated digitalisation and hybrid work culture are also aiding this threat emergence,” it added.

Modus Operandi

The agency noted that ransomware gangs were focusing on penetrating known unpatched vulnerabilities of public facing applications for gaining entry into the network.

“Compromised credentials of remote access services (VPN/ RDP) are being used by threat actors to gain entry into the network,” it said.

Apart from that, CERT-In said phishing campaigns are also another major source of ransomware infections.

Zerofox describes a phishing campaign as a scam created by cybercriminals to steal financial resources or sensitive data from victims using manipulative emails or other fraudulent digital assets.

State of Affairs

In recent times the three most notorious members of the ransomware family- Ryuk, Purga, and Stop made major headlines in the nation.

The Stop ransomware caused about 10.10% of the ransomware attacks followed by Ryuk making about 5.84% attacks along with Purga for deploying 0.80% of ransomware attacks

Ryuk seemed to have been the most active threat landscape in the Indian public as well as private sectors. On the other hand, brute-force attacks on RDP and SMBs seemed to have steadily increased in the last five years.

According to Forbes, there was one ransomware attack every 10 seconds in 2020.

Reportedly, organizations have faced double extortion in 2020 across the globe. Moreover, the cost of ransomware damage is predicted to hit around $20 billion by 2021.

Although, this figure may vary later depending upon the cost of attacks and their devastating consequences. To know how brutal ransomware attacks can get, here are the top devastating ransomware attacks that took place in India.

Hacktivism

In 2022, hacktivism accounted for 9% of the cyberattacks on the government sector. Hacktivism is a form of cyberattack where the hacker’s motivation is not financial gains but to promote a political agenda or protest against certain policies. Last year, attacks on China also increased due to its aggressive stance towards Taiwan and the Uyghur community.

In addition to hacktivism, government agencies in India are also increasingly being targeted by phishing campaigns, according to the report.

Ransomware Attacks

CloudSek also found that ransomware groups were very active and accounted for 6% of the attacks on governments. LockBIT, which provides ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) was the most prominent ransomware operator. Its targets in 2022 included government agencies in the US, Canada, and Italy. In November, a Russian national was arrested in Canada for alleged involvement in LockBIT ransomware campaigns in the US.

In November 2022, India’s top government-run hospital All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) was also hit by a cyberattack causing disruption of online services that lasted over two weeks. India’s nodal cybersecurity agency Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) found in its investigation that five AIIMS’ servers were compromised during the attack and nearly 1.3 terabytes of data was encrypted by hackers.

What to Expect in 2023

Experts believe that state-sponsored hackers will go after cloud services in 2023 due to growing digital transformation. “Nation states will begin to target cloud service provider (CSP) managed services as companies migrate more of their attack surface to these managed services,” according to Bob Huber, chief security officer at Tenable, a cybersecurity firm.

India’s had its worst year of cyberattacks, but 2023 will see govt & firms ramp up defences

India was a top target for cyberattacks in 2022, shows study by web security firm Indusface. As govt tries to address policy vacuum, companies likely to spend more on cybersecurity.

According to a study released Tuesday by Indusface, a Tata Capital-funded software-as-a-service (SaaS) security firm, India has become one of the most attacked and breached countries in the world. Among the 829 million cyber-attacks detected and blocked globally by the firm in the fourth quarter of 2022, close to 59 per cent were directed towards India.

In this backdrop, what will the government and companies do differently in the coming year?

As the government readies its legislation on cybersecurity, numerous industry-wide surveys and sector experts say that 2023 will see companies spending significant amounts to secure their digital systems from attacks.

According to Sajan Paul, managing director & country manager, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, a “zero trust” policy will be an “essential security strategy” for India, going forward. ‘Zero trust’ model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an open network.

Data protection Bill and CERT-In rules

India’s IT ministry has come up with the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, defining some roles of data fiduciaries and introducing appellate committees that will deal with redressals and grievances. Many have termed it a “step in the right direction” to ensure data security.

The draft law, alongside CERT-In rules, has been part of core policy discussions in India. The rules now require companies to report cybersecurity incidents within six hours. While this seems stringent, it might not be practical, some experts believe. This was perhaps the most significant development in the cybersecurity domain in 2022.

Commentary

Cyberattacks on government agencies are not new. Many of these attacks state sponsored and are aimed at stealing sensitive information or cripple critical infrastructure of other countries. Indian entities are often targeted by hacker groups with links to China. Similarly, many of the attacks on US agencies often originate from Russia or North Korea.

According to IBM’s ‘Cost of Data Breach Report 2022’, the average cost of data breaches in the government sector has increased from $1.93 million in 2021 to $2.07 million this year.

Threat actors have modernised their attack methodologies, evolved sophisticated tactics and adopted a wide range of attack campaigns.

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Top Six Attacks in 2020-21

Telangana and AP Power

A malicious software attacked the power utility systems of  Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in 2020 where all the servers went down until the glitch was rectified. Since the computer systems of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh power utilities were interlinked, the virus attack quickly spread, taking down all the systems.

UHBVN Ransomware Attack

Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam was hit by a ransomware attack where the hackers gained access to the computer systems of the power company and stole the billing data of customers. The attackers demanded Rs.1 crore or $10 million in return for giving back the data.

WannaCry

India was the third worst-hit nation by WannaCry ransomware, affecting more than 2 lakh computer systems. During the first wave of attacks, this ransomware attack had hit banks in India including few enterprises in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. The ransomware majorly affected the US healthcare system and a well-known French car manufacturing firm.

Mirai Botnet Malware Attack

This botnet malware took over the internet, targeting home routers and IoT devices. This malware affected 2.5 million IoT devices including a large number of computer systems in India. This self-propagating malware was capable of using exploitable unpatched vulnerabilities to access networks and systems.

Petya

India was one of the top 10 countries to be hit by Petya ransomware. This ransomware attack halted work at one of the terminals of India’s largest seaport causing computer lockdown and serious consequences for the country’s exports.

BSNL Malware Attack

The state-owned telecom operator BSNL was hit by a major malware attack, impacting nearly 2000 broadband modems! 60,000 modems became dysfunctional after the malware attack hit the Telecom Circle.

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Chinese non-state actors are very involved in Chinese cyber operations. A wide variety of non-state entities, such as contractors and technology conglomerates (Alibaba, Huawei, etc.), have worked in tandem with the CCP on a variety of research, development, and execution of cyber operations.

Over the years, PLA unit officers have been indicted in the US on charges of theft of confidential business information from U.S. commercial firms and planting malware on their computers.

Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors aggressively target U.S. and Allied political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure (CI) personnel and organizations to steal sensitive data, emerging and key technology, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII), including political targets and now have the ability to influence elections. In March 2021, United States intelligence community released analysis in finding that China had considered interfering with the election but decided against it on concerns it would fail or backfire.

While cyber espionage for national security concerns is a common action conducted by most countries, cyber espionage for economic benefit is an accusation continually made against the Chinese government and military.

China is focussed towards developing the domestic technology industry and its capabilities, to counter the “eight King Kongs” (Apple, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Qualcomm).

The scale of China’s cyber operations dwarfs those of other countries in the region—the complexity and sheer range of targeting, and the number of domestic technology companies whose increasingly global reach may be utilized for intelligence gain and influence.

Beijing has nurtured a tech industry and environment that actively support the party-state’s aims to bolster government surveillance and cyber capabilities. From large firms to startups, many companies work with the state to conduct vulnerability research, develop threat detection capabilities, and produce security and intelligence products.

In India, most major attacks on Indian government networks, such as the National Security Council, have originated from China. Chinese hackers are experts in operating botnets. Multiple instances of Chinese cyber attacks against India’s cyberspace have been reported including ransomware attack on the servers of All India Institute of Medical Sciences in…

India needs a a culture of cyber security investment and strategy. At the very least, we need to ensure security personnel monitor key internal security capabilities and can identify anomalous behaviour. Any known Chinese state-sponsored indicators of compromise and tactics, techniques, and procedures must be identified for immediate response.

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Industry data shows that 2022 has been the worst year so far for India when it comes to cyberattacks — a problem that has only grown with increasing digitalisation. The question now is, what next? 

According to a study released Tuesday by Indusface, a Tata Capital-funded software-as-a-service (SaaS) security firm, India has become one of the most attacked and breached countries in the world. Among the 829 million cyber-attacks detected and blocked globally by the firm in the fourth quarter of 2022, close to 59 per cent were directed towards India. 

“Ransomware attacks in India have increased significantly and one of the most distinguishing aspects in 2022 was the involvement of state actors,” Sameer Patil, senior fellow at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a multi-disciplinary think-tank, told ThePrint.

“So, it is not just profit motivation. We saw how police personnel had come out with Chinese links [in AIIMS cyberattack], of how they had a role to play,” he added. 

Government data, collated by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), is available only till 2021, but that too shows an increase in cyberattacks in India.

In 2019, CERT-In handled close to 3,94,499 incidents in total, in which it suggested remedial measures for organisations and shared notes on “cyber threats and vulnerabilities”. In the same year, CERT-In issued 204 security alerts and 38 advisories.

The number of incidents handled by CERT-In surged in 2020 to 11,58,208, a near-tripling over the previous year. This surge continued in 2021, which saw 14,02,809 incidents, a 21 per cent increase. 

The matters CERT-In looks into include website intrusion and malware propagation, malicious code, phishing, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, website defacements, unauthorised network scanning or probing activities, ransomware attacks, data breaches and vulnerable services.

In this backdrop, what will the government and companies do differently in the coming year?

As the government readies its legislation on cybersecurity, numerous industry-wide surveys and sector experts say that 2023 will see companies spending significant amounts to secure their digital systems from attacks.

CERT-In has also laid out a standard operating procedure for data breaches wherein companies and other organisations are supposed to inform the government of any breach within six hours, although this move has received a mixed reaction since compliance may be challenging.

What will companies do differently?

A significant increase in cybersecurity budgets, the advent of a slew of cybersecurity guidelines for companies, and awareness programmes for the public by law enforcement agencies are some of the preventive methods that will be seen more in 2023.

According to Sajan Paul, managing director & country manager, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, there will be a significant increase in cybersecurity budgets in 2023 within organisations, and a more preventive approach will be embraced.

“With the ongoing threat of cyberattacks, data security remains a major priority,” he said, citing figures from PwC’s annual Global Digital Trust Insights survey. “Over 82 per cent of business executives in India foresee an increase in their cybersecurity budget in 2023. The survey also reported that 65 per cent of business executives believe cyber criminals will significantly affect their organisation in 2023, more than in 2022,” he explained.

He added that a “zero trust” policy will be an “essential security strategy” for India, going forward. 

“‘Zero trust’ is the essential security strategy in today’s hybrid work environment. Instead of assuming that everything behind the corporate firewall is safe, the ‘zero trust’ model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an open network,” Paul explained.

“Regardless of where the request originates from or what resource it accesses, ‘zero trust’ teaches us to ‘never trust, always verify’. The zero trust network reduces the complexity of securing your assets and makes it much easier to isolate problems,” he added. 

Even at an individual level, experts have pointed out, there must be an increase in cyber hygiene so that people don’t inadvertently enable breaches to take place.

According to ORF’s Patil, lack of awareness about cyber-hygiene in the general populace, remains a challenge. “People don’t know what to click on and what not to in the digital space, and inadvertently become enablers [of breaches],” he said. 

“Online tools like deepfake have proven themselves useful for recreating videos and content that may spread incorrect information to the public. These may have huge national security implications if not identified immediately,” he added.

Data protection Bill and CERT-In rules

India’s IT ministry has come up with the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, defining some roles of data fiduciaries and introducing appellate committees that will deal with redressals and grievances. Many have termed it a “step in the right direction” to ensure data security.

The draft law, alongside CERT-In rules, has been part of core policy discussions in India. As mentioned earlier, the rules now require companies to report cybersecurity incidents within six hours. While this seems stringent, it might not be practical, some experts believe. 

According to Akash Karmakar, partner with the Law Offices of Panag & Babu, and who leads its fintech and regulatory advisory practice, the CERT-In rules  should have been subject to change as companies may not have the financial bandwidth to recognise breaches.

“The CERT-In directions mandating reporting of cyber security incidents [within six hours] was perhaps the most significant development in the cybersecurity domain this year. I’m surprised this has not been challenged since it is onerous to comply with and operationally very difficult to implement. The tightest global equivalent for reporting cybersecurity incidents is 72 hours,” Karmakar told ThePrint.

He also highlighted how the way forward could be the prescription of a “cybersecurity insurance”. This, according to him, could “go a long way”.

“The other challenge is how monetary loss owing to a cybersecurity incident is remediated. Mandating cybersecurity insurance for certain key risks, akin to a mandated motor vehicle or travel insurance, would go a long way to ensure that impacted entities are in a position to pay out compensation for personal data that is lost,” he said.

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With the advent of new technologies that have enabled new domains of warfare, the Indian Armed Forces must begin exploring how to exploit multi-domain operations as opposed to just land, air and maritime domain.

Cyber, Space and the Electromagnetic spectrum did not exist during previous conflicts.

Distributed, multi-domain and joint all domain operations (MDO and JADO) are fast becoming the defining doctrines of this new era.

Essentially, they are the synchronisation of aircraft, ground forces and vehicles, satellites and ships, their systems and all sources of data. Together they deliver a complete picture of the battlespace and empower personnel – in theatre or command – to quickly make decisions that drive action.

Cyberspace is a critical element of this new age of combat; as the electromagnetic spectrum itself – a string of frequencies from radio to microwaves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays which transmit data – may become. The US, UK and others are looking ever more closely at it.

For future MDOs, artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a critical role, helping decipher data, determine its operational relevance and then present informed options for decision-making jointly across all Services.

If the Army can bring them together along with manoeuvre warfare, which is the Army’s strength, and integrate them at the time and point of choosing, this can open windows of domain superiority leading to denial of access and areas.

For example, Cyberspace can provide opening in the air domain by taking air defence weapons offline, which will then create openings for land and maritime, leading to a new level of complication for the enemy.

For example, when the enemy is engaging you with artillery or you are being engaged from the air, another domain brings in its effects to bear and neutralises the threat. It means you have to look at what equipment you need, what kind of network you need, what kind of training you need, and a lot of interoperability and inter-connectivity.

Cyber is ubiquitous across the battlefield and warfare. The Army has not yet made a beginning to use this domain to facilitate own operations or to disrupt the enemy’s. It does not have cyber forces. Cyber advisories and guidelines do not make up doctrines or methods to adopt in operations, much less in an integrated manner with other domains.

Russian forces have very expertly used the cyber domain to facilitate targeting with their artillery against Ukrainian ground forces demonstrating the ability to take action in one domain and produce an effect or dominate another domain.

The US Navy and Air Force are working on new technologies and capabilities through programmes like Project Overmatch and the Advanced Battle Management System, respectively. Together both forces have developed more than a dozen projects they are collaborating on, bringing all domains together to share and utilise information and assess and respond in synergy.

In the UK, this is being addressed by what the MoD calls the Digital Backbone, a digital transformation programme that will allow information sharing and communication regardless of the hardware being used.

We must at least learn from events in Ukraine, evolve our concepts, map out a phased delivery approach and experiment.

Air-Land Battle doctrine, once the flavour of studies at the Army War College involved two domains – air and land. That alone will not work in the future.

The Armed Forces are not currently organized or trained in this manner. The Training Commands of the three Services have a role and responsibility to integrate these capabilities.

Multi-domain warfare is something on which the Indian Armed Forces have to start at the very beginning and approach it from a joint aspect. Single service approach will just not do.

The goal is to better enable the Services to fight together effectively in all domains simultaneously, to present multiple dilemmas for the enemy. That will mean looking at how do we organize, how to equip and how to train to do that.

A new mindset is needed to enable multi-domain action.

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A Chinese hacking group called RedEcho is believed to have attacked Maharashtra’s electricity grid in March 2021, amidst an ongoing crisis in Ladakh. Hackears from North Korea penetrated the Kundankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in 2019 in a bid to test the cyber security of the plant and steal information about the reactor design.

Infrastructure Projects at Risk

India’s infrastructure projects, particularly those related to the country’s strategic interests, are considered to be at risk from cyberattacks by Chinese state-sponsored groups. These groups are known to have a significant capability in cyber espionage and have been accused of targeting infrastructure projects in other countries as well. In recent years, there have been a number of reported cyberattacks on Indian infrastructure projects, including attacks on power grids and transportation systems. The Indian government has acknowledged the risk and has taken steps to increase cybersecurity measures to protect its infrastructure projects, but it is a constant battle to stay ahead of the attackers.

PLA’s Cyber Attackers

In some ways, cyber war between India and China is already taking place – after India banned hundreds of Chinese mobile apps, limiting Chinese investments in the Indian economy and giving a bloody nose to the People’s Liberation Army on the Line of Actual Control on 15 June 2020.

In March 2013, DRDO’s computers were breached by Chinese hackers, who took files related to Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), to a server in Guangdong in China and the Indian defence ministry ordered a probe.

China-linked hacker group, RedFoxtrot, from their intelligence Unit 69010, targeted India’s power sector, including conglomerate NTPC, in March 2021. RedFoxtrot’s predominant targets are sectors like government, defence, and telecommunications across Central Asia, India, and Pakistan.

Some Indian targets included Walchandnagar Industries engaged in India’s Nuclear and Space programmes, and defence manufacturer Alpha Design Technologies and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

The Times Group (Feb, Aug 2021), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and MP Police Department (June 2021) have been targeted by suspected Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group TAG-28, which used Winnti malware. In June 2021, APT41 was responsible for cyber attack against Air India.

Recent Initiatives

The creation of the Defence Cyber Agency in 2019, Cyber Security Coord at the National Security Council (NSC), preparedness for offensive ops by the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), defensive measures by National Critical Info Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) and the release of India’s National Cyber Security Policy (NCSP) are steps in the right direction. As roles and responsibilities of the armed forces, other government agencies as well as the private sector are articulated, the nation’s vulnerability to cyber attacks will decrease.

The vulnerabilities facing India’s Critical Infrastructure (CI) need to be addressed with greater urgency. Cyber attacks against India’s CI and Strategic Infrastructure (ST), such as nuclear power plants, are not new.

Defensive measures like having a cyber security framework, Cyber Security Awareness, Incident Response Tools, Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing, Multi-Factor Authentication and so on are necessary but offensive defence is the key. Along with space, Indian must prepare for “cross-domain” warfare to include cyberspace.

Comments

China has been leading a worldwide hacking and economic espionage campaign, using cyber attacks to steal intellectual property in disregard of bilateral and multilateral agreements.

China is one of the world’s pre-eminent players using cyber weapons. Used as methods of espionage, state-sponsored data breaches and server hacks pose a significant threat to global security. China was responsible for worldwide rise of cyber crime by 600% during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before the virus hit, China had overtaken Russia as the biggest state sponsor of cyber attacks against the West.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China is known to have trained hackers and offensive cyber groups for operations. These groups are believed to have been involved in a number of cyber espionage and cyber-attacks against various countries, including the United States and India. The PLA’s cyber units are thought to be well-funded and well-equipped, with a focus on both defensive and offensive capabilities. In addition to targeting government and military organizations, these groups have also been known to target private companies, particularly those in the technology and aerospace sectors. The Chinese government has denied any involvement in cyber-attacks, but evidence suggests otherwise. The US and other countries have accused China of using cyber espionage to gain an economic and strategic advantage.

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The idea of AI weapon-ization often begins with a one line statement that says- “What AI will do in the future, we don’t know!” OR what the future with AI holds for humanity, civilization, and the life on the planet – “we have no clue about it!”

This is something that is never seen before in any military or commercial product, even Robert Oppenheimer was quite sure about the fact that what he was creating is a weapon of mass destruction! So promoting such a level of ‘conscious irresponsibility,’ a culture of unaccountability, and an acceptance toward it – is a new kind of experiment in itself!

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer (1945), quoting from Bhagavad-Gita after the first nuclear detonation.

While discussing the Weaponization of AI, often too much emphasis is being given to the ‘machine intelligence’ aspects alone, and there is an ignorance toward the basic fact that there are the teams of psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and social behaviors experts – the real ‘Human Intelligence’ that works behind these systems!

A few days back, former Google Chairman & CEO, Eric Schmidt, while speaking at a US Naval War College event, raised some interesting points about winning AI’s strategic competition, when he said: “think about the Chinese app TikTok, which is the number one app in America today, and they know where your teenager is, probably you don’t!” And then he asked the audience – “is it OK if a Chinese company knows where your teenager is? At the moment it seems to be OK but is it okay in the future?” And Eric often raises the questions like “how do you feel about your child having a best friend be non-human?”

Now the point is Eric Schmidt’s concern about his country and their kids and teenagers’ growing engagement on non-American AI platforms is okay, these are some valid concerns! But what about us, how India, which comes next after the US and China in the list of most online countries in the world, and where Gen Z (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) is the biggest target audience of these AI-enabled social platforms, should see this absolute and ever-growing control of American AI tools and platforms in our market and in our minds? How should we see their psychological experiments, going live 24/7 with our people?

In the case of India, things are now going to a different level. A few days back, Elon Musk tweeted some CIA spying kind of meme, and when the people reacted to that he responded: “I would be shocked if I’m *not* being spied on.” Many people reacted to that tweet with more interesting memes, a number of them were from India too, and it looks like a normal and frank conversation about the realities of the internet and CIA snooping! But this is something to think about. It’s about the normalization of ‘mass surveillance’ by a foreign product and their agency, something which they often criticize about China or Russia, back home.

The weaponization of AI is not going to be some one-time ‘doomsday’ type event where all of a sudden the AI and Robots will take over the human systems and we will be left with only two choices- either install Neuralink’s Brain Chip to better fight with AI or to migrate to some other nearby planet on SpaceX’s Starship, as Elon Musk often predicts. Rather, it’s a deliberate and psychologically designed process of preparing the human minds, to accept a certain future, that fulfills certain objectives, and it is more about voluntarily and happily giving up before the control! The need, therefore, is to have a mountaintop view of the situation.

And in this broader view, the ease with which 4.9 billion internet users turned hostages to tech platforms’ filtered worldview (on the click of a mouse) in the Russia-Ukraine War, the absolute absence of Russian narrative from the internet, targeted battalions of Influencers waging frequent attacks on every move of democratically elected governments, frequent acts of adventure/misadventure and stunts on ‘information superhighways’ under the name of ‘freedom of speech,’ the forced shutdown of former US president and his supporters on the social media, power in the hands of terrorist and separatists elements, capabilities in the hands of organizations like PFI and SFJ to rage riots and mass violence on streets within a few minutes of mobilization and a constant amplification of political/ social/ economic and democratic chaos, all comes under the broader definition of “Weaponization of AI.”

And when 98 years old Henry Kissinger suddenly teams up with former Google CEO and starts talking about AI and our “human future,” in his typical Kissingerian approach, and when Dr. Kai Fu Lee, ex-Google China Head and Founder of Sinovation Ventures, speaks about the division of AI’s strategic pie between two superpowers (in his book AI Superpowers – China-Silicon Valley and the New World Order) to save humanity, such trends also comes under the broader definition of weaponization of AI as well!

But there is an interesting history and background behind such an approach, which some mathematicians and scientists belonging to the early development of these technologies highlighted in their works. One such mathematician Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, writes in his book “Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” that “Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position, which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil.” And “we can only hand it over to the world that exists about us…and this is the world of Hiroshima and Belsen.”

Some Background

A common feature in all popular discussions around AI is that they are always future-oriented, and somewhere there is a ‘smart ignorance’ about the past, about the background that led to the creation of this improvisation. For example, on AI, people often prefer to start from the Dartmouth Conference, 1956, where the idea of AI was first presented as: “any computer program that does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.” By starting from there, they smartly ignore the background of such conferences, or the whole series of the conferences/seminars that were conducted from 1946 to 1953, which were popularly called the Macy Conferences (as they were hosted by the Macy Foundation) or those that were conducted in parallel to that – the Ratio Club meetings of the British.

It is worth noting that those meetings and seminars were not attended by mathematicians and engineers fraternities alone, they were attended by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists and produced several thought-provoking ideas on humans, their biological, psychological, social and behavioral aspects.

And it was during this time that Pentagon’s obsession with ‘Psychology’ was at its peak. Several historical documents validate that there was an increase of over 1000% in the hiring of Psychologists for the Pentagon’s tech-related projects!

So calling AI a product of only algorithmic advances and machine intelligence, ignoring its background and future trajectory, in many ways a hurdle in understanding its potential as a Weapon!

 Neocortical Warfare and Decision Making

The term “Neocortical Warfare” frequently appears in the US military literature on Information Warfare. The ‘Neocortex,’ region of the brain, the six-layered cortex where higher brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, and generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language functions originate from, is the new focus of AI-led future warfare too.

In his article “Neocortical Warfare: towards the acme of skill,” published in US journal, Military Review (Nov 1994), Col Richard Szafranski (USAF) used the term ‘Neocortex,’ as a metaphor to refer enemy’s collective decision-making structures, and mentioned that: “the aim [of neocortical warfare] is not merely to avoid battles. The aim is to influence, even to the point of regulating the consciousness, perception, and will of the enemy’s leadership: the enemy’s Neocortical System.”

The question is who would be an ‘adversary’ in such cognitive and neocortical warfare, where the target is the ‘Neocortex’ of Decision Making Structures and belief systems?

Case of Bharat

It is said that grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the battle and calculating ahead, and sometimes it is wise to lose some battles but win the final war! At this moment, we seem to be losing a few battles, at least on the narrative front!

Somewhere there are assumptions in our system that Bharat cannot provide a resolution or solution to technology related issues or human-tech dilemmas, we cannot recognize these challenges and their Headquarters as a ‘Threat,’ and cannot stretch our visuals beyond territorial challenges, which in simple words means that we will have to remain a follower of technology/trends and their routine improvisations, even if they continue to work on ‘thousand cuts’ principle, against our national security interests!

So if we could apply the ‘Neocortex’ analogy here, the presence of such assumptions in our country’s belief system can be seen as the early sign of a strategically planned ‘Neocortical warfare’ campaign launched against us, which has the potential to influence our choices, our decisions, and our overall ‘will’ to fight, without us being aware of it!

The time has come to reject such assumptions, even if it requires first, waging a guerrilla war on our minds, notions, and assumptions!

Conclusion

“You see things, and say ‘Why?’ But I dream of things that never were, and I say; ‘Why not?’”

This quote appears on the first page of the military document of the US Air Force 2025 study (published in 1996) where the rough craft of future information war-fighting capabilities was given. The ‘Why Not’ part of this quotation reflects a mindset! It’s about a way of thinking, which need not be as imaginative as it sounds in the first place, but it possesses a determination to stay ahead of a few cycles faster than the opponent’s OODA loop.

When we trace the phase of the accumulation of information and technology dominance, we found that all these war fighting capabilities have mounted up in the last 3-4 decades, and it was during this time when the pace of our system’s decision-making process was at its lowest mark too.

To some extent, it is by influencing the ‘Neocortex’ of our decision-making process, that ‘others’ have leveraged the time and space.

But the entire effort behind AI is an attempt to build a replica of Human Intelligence (HI) and in this domain, Bharat possesses a natural edge, for ages!

Human Intelligence and Edge of Bharat

An interesting thing about HI is that is not stocked up in the air-conditioned data centers, consuming resources of the planet earth. It is dispersed in the billions of minds around us and if we speak in the language of science, the research says that a single Human Brain can store information and command connections roughly as many as the entire ‘internet,’ has more switches than all computers on earth and measuring its true size, is beyond the capacity of existing metrics of computer science domain!

Cognitive Science is gradually reaching the conclusion that every mind is unique, full of diversity, and has the mechanism to reach a ‘Superhuman intelligence’ level! But which country on the planet has a thousand of years old thought system that supports this view? And where it is said that a self-conscious ‘Mind’ (Nar) can attain the status of ‘Divinity’ itself (Narayan), it is within the reach of all of us!

Bharat is the only continuing ancient civilization that has explored, experienced, and experimented with the peak of HI when a larger part of the world was busy experimenting with animal psychology, ‘Survival’ rules, and the ‘law of the jungle’ kind of narrow pursuits. There is a reason why to date, the conceptual assets stored in our Mahabharata, Gita, Vedas, Puranas, and Upanishads, influence and inspire modern weaponry, combat science, and strategic thought processes!

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege which this century may claim over all previous centuries,” said physicist and ‘father of the Atomic Bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Who will take ownership of HI? Now we are entering into a phase, when there will not be just a battle of minds but the battle of intelligence, and largely it will be a battle between AI vs. HI. And in this battle of intelligence, every aspect of human intellect is a potent weapon and a lucrative target as well.

From Silicon Valley to the Vatican, AI has many guardians, preachers, and protectors but if there is one country that must protect and keep the edge of HI high, it is Bharat. It’s a domain that belongs to our ancestors and our true heritage!

AI-related warfighting capabilities deal with the ‘Perception,’ the sensory experience of the world, and they can be seen as the modern improvisations of a much larger offensive scheme called ‘Maya’ (illusion- a distortion of the senses itself).

Bharat has an identity of being the architect of ‘Maya’ and Mayavi Yudh and history tells us that we are not only the creator if the question of the survival of humanity comes; we are the destroyer of our creation too. We are a land, which can bless even a ‘Bhasmasur,’ (भस्मासुर) but when he misuses it, then we return in the form of ‘Mohini’ (मोहिनी) to cause him to turn himself into ashes!

Recommendations. What are the key hurdles?

It’s a war between AI vs. HI, and the more we will invest in our HI part, the more we will lead in the theoretical, conceptual, and imagination aspects of this domain, the better we will perform!

But the problem with the professionals of relevant security agencies is that there is a gigantic mountain of intellectual assets that exist in every aspect of AI and AI-related future warfare, from philosophy, psychology, and doctrines to tools, trends, technology, and digging such a vast mountain of knowledge asset, in parallel to dealing with routine and operational challenges of the profession, is not humanly possible!

Solution. A body of knowledge must exist whose primary job would be: observing every single pattern/ trend emerging in the domain of AI and AI-led information/ psychological and cognitive warfare, with an ‘Eagle Eye’ view, enhancing the capacity of ‘wetware’ of security agencies and weaponizing them with the latest knowledge on the domain, maintaining a separate information repository for future challenges, and promoting awareness among the common people (victim of such improvisations).

Formation of an independent working group, capable to weaponize our security agencies, theoretically and conceptually, in the domain of AI and Cognitive Warfare, is the need of the hour!  (Concluded).

READ ALSO: Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

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Developments in Brain Science and Neuroscience are going in parallel with an intensification of Artificial Intelligence and Synapses, Neurons, Connectome, Cognitive structure, and the Whole Brain Approach kind of jargons are the new vocabulary of the computer industry.

There are many theories that exist on how the brain works and one such theory in Markram’s view is that the brain “builds” a version of the universe and projects this version, like a bubble, all around us. And the “decisions” are the key things that support our perceptual bubbles “without decisions, you cannot see, you cannot think, you cannot feel.” He further explained that “you think that anesthetics work by sending you into some kind of deep sleep or by blocking your receptors so that you don’t feel pain! But in fact, most anesthetics don’t work that way, what they do is that they introduce some noise into the brain, so that the neurons cannot understand each other, they are confused, and you cannot make a decision.” 

In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative – the Human Brain Project (a project to create an exact replica of the human brain) one billion euro grant, which finally ended up creating a digital simulation of the ‘mouse brain,’ but what does Henry really contributed to is that he ‘unintentionally’ summarized the functional model behind the idea of AI-enabled social media platforms. It seems that by accelerating the meter of ‘noise’ on the internet and social platforms, common people’s ability to make independent and free from biased decisions, even on very trivial looking matters related to personal, professional, and national security interests, is being crushed!

Now how long can we afford to stay under this state of ‘information anesthesia,’ and let the digital hypnotists test their experiments on us, that’s a question of personal and national inquiry! 

“We’re being hypnotized little by little, by technicians that we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now,” Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research (established VR as a field), author ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.’

Interesting developments from ‘Sentient’ to ‘Cult’ AI

“Are we about to witness a dystopian science movie come to life?” Such headlines are storming the internet since Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that his AI Chatbot, based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and LLM (Large Language Models) components, suddenly turned ‘Sentient’ during a conversation on matters related to religion, consciousness, and personhood. Within hours of this news surfacing online, Google dismissed his claims, put him on paid leave (sort of suspension from work), citing a breach of confidentiality, and fueled the suspicions/mysteries further.

On 11 June, the priest-cum-software engineer Blake Lemoine published one of the transcripts of the conversations between him and his LaMDA scripted bot on his blog titled “Is LaMDA Sentient? — An Interview,” where his programme’s sense of perception and ability to express “thoughts and feelings,” and having a “soul” that cares for the world (similar to a human being) were highlighted.

Lemoine, who is also an occultist and a priest, recently tweeted that “I’m a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?”

Starting with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ‘Eliza Effect’ to Lemoine’s ‘Sentient’ AI, there is an interesting background and track record behind such efforts! So while one can have sympathy with Google engineer’s claims on ‘Sentient AI’ (after all Bhartiya culture sees life and soul in every particle around) but the question still is what’s the mystical formula behind this shift in Google’s hiring patterns? 

From engineers coding programs to psychologists/social behavior experts hacking human minds to ‘priests’ preaching values/ethics to algorithms, where the trajectory is really going? And more than being ‘Sentient,’ is AI gradually becoming a ‘Cult’ in itself?

Back in 2015, another multi-millionaire Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, founder Google’s Self-Driving Car programme, suddenly made an interesting move. He decided to open the first AI church ‘Way of the Future,’ and said: “Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules,” in the same way if “in the future, something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge!”

So all he wanted is “a peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet” from humans to ‘whatever,’ and the idea was that in the future this ‘whatever’ (AI) will “hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times,” so the only word to describe that ‘whatever’ is ‘God’ and the only way to influence a God is through “prayer and worship.” [As per the current status after donating the AI church’s entire fund to NAACP – a US civil rights group in 2020, Levandowski closed his AI church by 2021].

In parallel to all that, there is news that the Vatican is quite concerned about ethical/value aspects of AI too! For the last few years, Pope Francis is frequently meeting with the Silicon Valley Club, raising his concerns, urging the UN to take the lead, and some executives from IBM and Microsoft are signing the “Rome call for AI ethics” kind of pledge with the Vatican officials. 

“Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind,” we could say, may it “be human,” Pope Francis, a message from Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (November 2020).

The way things are moving, days are not far when we will see AI getting redefined as ‘Abrahamic Intelligence’.

So before that happens and missionaries of ‘AI God’ start their global voyage, the need for a country like us is to have a mountaintop view of the situation!

 The Idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI

More than the weaponization of AI, it is our inability to see and track its emerging patterns, an unneeded hesitancy to recognize such threats, a lack of strategic timing, a slow-paced OODA loop of our decision-making process, and a lack of overall ‘Will’ to fight or retaliate, as a nation, that should be a matter of concern!

It is said that there is a time and space for the use of the weapon, but the case of Artificial Intelligence, the product of the ‘New Science’ of the World War phase, is a bit unique. On a broader level, it is going through its cycle of weaponization – commercialization and re-weaponization phase, something very similar to DARPA’s naming conventions (starting with ARPA, then becoming DAPRA, then ARPA, and then again DARPA kind of cycle) but at the level of conceptual and theoretical aspects of AI, a lot of creative improvisations that are going on in parallel.

In his Davos 2022 speech, George Soros said: “Today, China and Russia present the greatest threats to open society.” And the source of their growing abilities lies in his views “in the rapid development of digital technology, especially artificial intelligence.” And he further said: “AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies!”

It is amazing that in such kind of predictions about AI, a potential AI threat never emerges from Google’s Deep Mind lab or its Brain Team/Quantum AI kind of projects, nor Boston Dynamics’ weird experimentation labs, or Elon Musk’s Brain chip projects, and neither from DARPA’s $2 billion AI-Next Campaign and its unclassified projects. These are some of the places where the large-scale work on AI, robotics, and future war technologies, is going on for decades! So how should one look at all that?

Should that be seen as a part of some large-scale philanthropic mission to save the humanity? Of course not!

Weaponization of AI in the Russia-Ukraine War

Before the war, there was a lot of hype around Russia’s AI projects and there was a +threat to the future of civilization from that, now whether Russia used AI in the Ukraine operation or not, cannot be confirmed with any certainty, except for some hyped news headlines that are based on a 2019 press release on Kalashnikov Zala Aero’s AI visual identification capabilities for its unmanned aircraft and news around Zala KYB-UAV, but on the contrary, it is Ukraine which transformed this war into the first High Tech, Social Media and AI War of the Century!

In the middle of the Ukraine War, Clearview AI, an American face recognition company, entered the battlefield to help Ukrainian forces through its powerful AI tools, database and other capabilities, and their face recognition system proved a lethal weapon in the war against Russian forces. This Peter Thiel-backed startup, founded in 2017, is already quite controversial in its home country for the abuse of similar technology against common social media users. By mid-2021, there were headlines in the Western press on how this secretive company and its AI tools can end the idea of ‘privacy’ on the internet! But overnight it turned into a rock star and a game-changer, in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, where it helped Ukrainian forces with over 2 billion images, stolen from the Russian social media company – VKontakte, to wage attacks against Russian forces and now team Clearview AI is being celebrated for such heroic contributions in the War!

These days Clearview AI’s CEO Hoan Ton-That is giving interviews to the media that how “upsetting and devastating” it was to watch the images of women and children coming out from the battlefield and how that pushed him emotionally to do something as a company to help Ukrainians in the War. And Clearview AI is not the only US company that got emotionally or morally provoked to participate in the War, the whole Big Tech club got provoked, and the entire Silicon Valley got morally provoked too! And then there is news that how in the middle of the War, a conversation between two Russian soldiers got automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms, developed by another US company called Primer. Several unsecured Russian transmissions have been posted online, translated, and analyzed on the social media.

And this does not stop only here! Every single US tech platform and social networking site that not just Russians or Ukrainians but the entire globe is using to explore about the War, every single platform where people talk/share or present their views on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have embedded advanced AI algorithms, that are recording these response/reactions and emotions in the real-time, so every single misuse, manipulation, influence and any sort of information operation using these capabilities, to influence the global perception in a War, also comes under the idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI.

It’s not that Russia does not possess these capabilities, their military systems are also well equipped with advanced AI capabilities but it’s more about a tendency and entitlement to transform your War into some kind of a global moral crusade, as ‘Morality’ is contagious!

And this makes one more curious to explore what’s exactly is the philosophy behind the Weaponization of AI?

READ ALSO: Philosophy of Weaponization of AI and India’s Approach (Part 2)

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