Unless India improves its cyber defence capabilities, the country’s critical national infrastructure — oil pipelines, steel plants and nuclear reactors — will be vulnerable to the kind of attack that damaged the Iranian nuclear programme.
In today’s world, when most computers are linked to the World Wide Web, the threats posed by cyber adversaries including hostile nations, hackers, and cyber mercenaries to national security are enormous. A related challenge is to protect the critical national infrastructure — stock market brokerage platforms, steel plants, air traffic signal management, oil pipelines, nuclear reactors, power plants, civil telecommunication networks — all of which now rely on computer networks for operational reasons.