Two days after my post suggesting that the massive electricity outage in India might be sabotage of some kind, I find that the Indian Defense Review has taken up the theme.
I’m not sure whether to feel flattered or worried. In a post entitled “Is Electricity Outage a Cyber Attack on India by China?” Air Vice -Marshal A. K. Tiwari evades addressing the issue, but he does provide a lengthy description of the concept of cyberwarfare and the issues involved.
Why am I worried? Because I rather think someone is setting up China for a confrontation with India that can do neither country any good.
It’s not that the Chinese are incapable of stealth attacks. But I wonder about attacks that come with Chinese IP addresses attached to them.
That was the case with the Vizag attack on the Indian Navy’s HQ recently.
I’m more inclined to think that the Anglo-Zionist establishment might be stirring up things, especially in light of the Gupta case, the attack on the fishing boat near Dubai, the Time cover story of Manmohan Singh, the Anna Hazare Trojan-horse, and dozens of other incidents I’ve listed several times on this blog.
Malefactors use bloggers to unwittingly amplify suspicions, rumors, or possibilities and lend the very credence those rumors need to succeed in having an effect. I wouldn’t like to play the role of dupe in any kind of psywar.
On the other hand, I get a kick out of seeing my narrative echoed by at least one listener in a position of influence.
“When one’s computer system does not work, it is not easy to distinguish whether the failure is a genuine malfunction or a result of malicious attack. More often than not one tends to believe that his computer system itself is malfunctioning. So it is difficult to determine if one is under cyber attack. The nature of attacks are such, for example hidden Trojans activated on command or at pre-determined time, that one does not know when the actual attack was launched.
The origins of attack also remain uncertain. The attacking nation or non-state actor can route his attack via a computers located in a third country or even through benign computers based in the country being attacked. These could be the personal computers of citizens of the country under attack. Such an approach poses major dilemma for defender and for the right to computer privacy in democratic societies.
The malware can be inbuilt in to the computer system at manufacturing stage itself. It can be pre-designed in micro chips for various items like sensors, routers, switches etc. It can be injected later on into system as a sleeper cell. Its algorithm can be programmed in variety of ways to defeat most defenses.
The defender in cyber world has to cope with many problems. The existing defenses are against only known viruses/worms. Defense networks, therefore, require constant upgradation. Even secure nets can be injected with virus even though attacker is not physically connected into the net. But then excessive security on the net decrease the system speed.”
lets hope is it due to a failure in the grid system that has its roots in the gov’s lack of support/corruption that has made it what it is today.
@Will
It’s not so much corruption in this case, as it is the policy of giving farmers electricity for free or heavily subsidised, so they have no incentive not to waste and no ability to set their prices correctly.
It’s also pervasive theft by people tapping into wires running to paying customers.
Think of cable theft in the US.
Theft in this case is caused by LACK OF government, not too much government. It’s caused by the very low level of policing per person in the country.
This is exactly why these binaries of state versus no-state don’t always work in a very neat way.
The police are absolutely inadequate (not enough)and heavily controlled by local mafias (corrupt).
In the US, you have an opposite problem. You have too many policemen per capita and too much surveillance.
That is the rationale for the biometric ID in India, to prevent such pervasive theft, especially in government welfare programs.
But to me that’s a counterproductive measure.
What is needed is education – not government schools, but simple public expression and stigmatisation of theft – naming and shaming. Revival and encouragement of religious based moral instruction would help. Because then you are not destroying the culture itself.
But there again, you have the heavy hand of the Western NGOs and foundations, bent on breaking up, denigrating or perverting traditional religious teaching and pitting one religion against the other. So they start running down local initiatives and religious teaching and their social uplift (in the way that the Hindu missions and charities are attacked or passed over in silence as if they don’t exist) and you have a constant attempt to connect morality or social effort only with the efforts of Christians or Western outfits. It’s pure brainwashing, but since the West has the power of the press, and the Indian English language media, by and large, imitates or is controlled by Westernized entities, the result is estrangement from the local culture, from Hinduism.
And you get an excessive deference to minorities that is also another source of instability and fracturing in the body politic. People think it’s progressive to be a “global citizen”. Well and good, but the chances are that when you are a “global citizen” you are simply a patsy for transnational interests that are largely dominated by Western corporate interests. So transnationalism in reality becomes deference to transnational elites – who are the puppet masters behind the curtain.
So it is far more complex than focusing just on the state.