Pakistan ill prepared for information hostility
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Minimal exposure of critical applications to global internet suggested
Pakistan continues to ignore the threat of a state-sponsored information attack despite increasing employment of internet attacks in conflicts between states, speakers at a forum warned Sunday.
Regardless of growing threat, our country is ill prepared to face a cyber-attack on its critical military, economic and technological infrastructure, they said.
Majority of the policymakers still view cybercrimes as a tool for counterfeiting, spam, hacking, denial of service attacks, money laundering and breaches of privacy etc., which is not the case, said Dr. Murtaza Mughal, President Pakistan Economy Watch while speaking at Fikr-e-Farda Forum.
One of our enemies is among the world leaders in the IT that can use its skills for espionage as well as in future conflicts. Yet the threat is little understood and not taken seriously at home, he added.
Dr. Murtaza Mughal while underlining the importance cyber security said that intranet should be preferred in high security environments. Critical applications and important data should have minimum exposure to the global internet.
“Administrators should carefully control the access point to ensure inability of outsiders to disrupt internal networks or gain unauthorized access,” he said adding that all sensitive data must be encrypted.
To minimise chances of breach, everyone should ensure that their passwords contain alphabetic characters, numbers as well as symbolizations, he said.
Government as well as security establishment has to safeguard our military, commercial and industrial secrets from attacks that can have a crippling effect.
Other speakers including diplomats and retired top army officials said that internet security is a national security concern.
They said that India has again opted for negotiations after sensing changed US strategy about Afghanistan which could be a severe blow to its interests in the war-torn country.
India has realised that key players have understood the importance of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan for brokering any deal with Taliban. This is reason behind India’s recent move for recommencement of talks with Islamabad, a political analyst said.
We should strive for peace without which prosperity is impossible but always carry out maximum preparations anticipating a anticipating a possible attack.
