Indian defense chief admits China’s cyber-weapons would ‘disrupt large number of systems’ whenever Beijing presses the button The highest-ranked officer in India’s armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation’s defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor. General Bipin Rawat, a four-star general and since 2020 the first to hold a new role …
>The counter attack will presumably be launching call centre scams...
Damn, you got there first.....
Actually, if the Chinese succeed in disabling India's communication infrastructure they'd be doing us all a favor since most incoming phone calls we get in the US are from Indian scam call centers. The Indian government seems to be completely disinterested -- when one gets identified the police might make a raid, good headline grabbing PR stuff, but the staff just open up in another office. (There's probably too much money washing around to make for a serious enforcement effort -- despite the widespread publicity about the various scam types they still catch enough victims to be quite lucrative.)
Modi and Jinping were regularly meeting for smiles and handshakes before the pandemic. I doubt the renewed border tensions or the continuing cyber noose around India's neck have removed the need to collaborate on trade, terrorism and other shared interests, and to pretend to be best buddies while doing so.
There is plenty of collaboration, by force of circumstance as you say, but despite following their interactions fairly closely, I've seen no sign of either side making any effort to "pretend to be best buddies while doing so". It suits each side to use the other more as a bogeyman than a faux friend.
One should assume even the Indian Army does have a wireless encrypted communication network which cannot be easily "hacked".
You know, something like "shortwave radio plus TYPEX" or a slightly improved version of that.
And yeah, I know about jamming and all that. I think the Indians have heared about frequency hopping by now.
RF Jamming is pretty easy. China is a leader in drones. When I mention the porous nature of their entire Infrastructure, my Indian friends have no clue. Each and every system they have is hackable as they have not invested in cybersecurity. And bureaucracy of India demands the lowest cost bidder win the bid.
Even home routers are subject to attacks as they call home: to China. PC's, laptops, cellphones etc. have bloatware that communicates with China.
Every time I get a pushback from my friends, I show them how their favorite site that can be hacked.
The whole state of complacency and denial is interesting.
Procedures on how to work around an outage, fast recovery from secure backups and a plan on how to improve security. How does that compare with other militaries who might be in a similar position? The real danger is when someone says their systems are secure already.
Good luck. A country that took 15 years to buy 30+ planes, 15+ years to buy badly needed howitzers, etc. will probably never do anything till they have surrendered to the Chinese. I don't see anything other than bidding for the lowest price as the only criteria for product selection.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
