Preparing against the potential threats for National security and its Information infrastrcture


HemRaj
Hemraj@ieee.org,hem@adityabirla.com


Ranjit Kumar

Nitin Tyagi

Abstract
This is going to be a cold, bloodless war. Where the byte hurts more than the bullet. Now we need to be prepared for covert battles in cyberdom, where the enemy's borders are defined on a personal computer.

When we take up this topic for further discussions then it is not our audacity but it’s a sincere and honest effort to emphasize on the need for our awareness in the field of securing our information infrastructure.

Computers are a major source of information leakage. In this paper we would analyze the weak corners and discuss the intelligent implementation of network security tools to protect our data and information servers.

Networked computers, besides facilitating state-of-the-art processing and time crunching, offer multi-tire back ups. Hacking in could paralyze the whole system such as financial, banking, electrical supply, water, and telecommunications networks.

Few months back Computer hackers have hijacked the Indian army's Kashmir Website and the Website's title page featured photographs overwritten with the words "stop the Indians" and "save Kashmir. The pictures showing Kashmiri militants allegedly killed by Indian forces were posted on other pages under headings such as ''massacre'', ''torture'', and ''extra-judicial execution’’.

Since the Pokhran blasts, hackers have been regularly attacking websites of Indian organizations. The homepages of the Prime Ministers Office, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the Ministry of Information Technology and Videsh Sanchar Nigam were hacked into and defaced with anti-India obscenities.

More serious than Islamic militants is the threat posed by another neighboring country. According to a report from US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, this neighboring country feels that it can achieve hegemony in Asia only by integrating information warfare into its geopolitical strategies. It was stated that this country is quickly integrating the latest information warfare techniques into its Peoples War concept. This development has been ignored by the West but will have far-reaching strategic and operational implications.

Indian Government should establish a national centre for information systems security. It should tap the expertise of universities and private software and Internet companies. India is a country well acclaimed for its Information Technology (IT) expertise but inspite of such a giant IT pool people are not coming forward to counter these external hostile attacks. Recent launch of Google Earth has also been observed as a threat against national security.

Aim of this paper is to create interest and awareness among people to explore the avenues of network security and to work more diligently to face and tackle any external attacks and intrusion on information infrastructure.

For instance if you think that by implementing passwords your system is safe forget it. An intelligent hacker can break your BIOS passwords within a minute. Windows Password files can be easily be deciphered especially 98 Version. If you think Linux is secure then its also a soothing lie, it has also vulnerable loopholes. To make our information infrastructure more secure we need to think with the point of view of a hostile hacker and then start plugging the loopholes in our network.

In the paper we would also be discussing in detail about the methods, tools and packages available such as network intrusion detection system, real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. Methods such as protocol analysis, content searching/matching can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts.