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A Force to reckon with : The Tribune India

July 5, 2021/in Internet Security

Manoj Joshi

Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation

There is considerable alarm in India’s strategic community as to whether the moves towards restructuring the armed forces to create theatre commands have been sufficiently thought through. A great deal of it arises from concerns that the man chosen to lead the task in 2017, Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat, has never really had the intellectual heft to handle it. He proved this spectacularly last week in declaring at a seminar that the Indian Air Force was merely ‘a supporting arm to the armed forces, just as artillery support or the engineer support the combatant arms in the Army.’

In one sentence, he negated the advances in warfighting that have taken place since World War II, and raised huge question marks about the intellectual underpinnings of the process he and his team are planning to put the Indian military through.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that the next conventional war will, in all likelihood, be initiated by cyber attacks, followed by air strikes on the land and sea. To be successful, the Army, Navy and the Air Force will have to use the Indian variants of the American AirLand and AirSea battle doctrines. There will be no room for single service ego trips here; ignore the compulsions of fighting on an integrated war plan, and you lose the war.

The purpose of creating a theatre command is the need for a structure that can fight an integrated battle. This is not about ordering a platoon on parade to make a right or a left turn. It is about taking a million-and-a-half-strong, somewhat archaic, war machine and putting it through new paces. The danger is that bits and pieces of that machine may fall off, be forgotten, or be incapable of meeting the new demands.

The IAF has categorically made it clear that it has very different views from those expressed by General Rawat. These were put forward at the same seminar by Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria. In such circumstances, it would be foolhardy for the military to undertake the leaps being envisaged.

Decisions taken without careful study could unbalance…

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At least 10 hacking groups using Microsoft software flaw : The Tribune India

March 11, 2021/in Computer Security

Washington, March 10

At least 10 different hacking groups are using recently discovered flaws in Microsoft Corp’s mail server software to break into targets around the world, cybersecurity company ESET said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The breadth of the exploitation adds to the urgency of the warnings being issued by authorities in the United States and Europe about the weaknesses found in Microsoft’s Exchange software.

The security holes in the widely used mail and calendaring solution leave the door open to industrial-scale cyber-espionage, allowing malicious actors to steal emails virtually at will from vulnerable servers or move elsewhere in the network. Tens of thousands of organizations have already been compromised, Reuters reported last week, and new victims are being made public daily.

Earlier on Wednesday, for example, Norway’s parliament announced data had been “extracted” in a breach linked to the Microsoft flaws. Germany’s cybersecurity watchdog agency also said on Wednesday two federal authorities had been affected by the hack, although it declined to identify them.

While Microsoft has issued fixes, the sluggish pace of many customers’ updates – which experts attribute in part to the complexity of Exchange’s architecture – means the field remains at least partially open to hackers of all stripes. The patches do not remove any back door access that has already been left on the machines.

Also, some of the back doors left on compromised machines have passwords that are easily guessed, so that newcomers can take them over.

Microsoft declined to comment on the pace of customers’ updates. In previous announcements pertaining to the flaws, the company has emphasized the importance of “patching all affected systems immediately.”

Although hacking has appeared to be focused on cyber espionage, experts are concerned about the prospect of ransom-seeking cybercriminals taking advantage of the flaws because it could lead to widespread disruption.

ESET’s blog post said there were already signs of cybercriminal exploitation, with one group that specializes in stealing computer resources to mine…

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