India Needs To Protect Cyber Sovereignty Like Its Defending Border With China: Former Israel Defence Forces Cyber Head

NEW DELHI: “The digital landscape is growing very, very fast. Like the traditional domains we are used to protecting—borders, skies and seas—protecting this landscape takes a lot of effort. Just like protecting the body you need to deal with viruses. Countries need to understand where the threat is, they need to understand how serious the threat is and they need to intervene and cope with the threat and somehow find a vaccine and deal with it,” says Brigadier General (Retd) Yaron Rosen, the former chief of Israel’s Defence Forces Cyber Staff. “The SolarWinds hack is a perfect example of a huge espionage campaign. States need to protect their cyberspace sovereignty just like you (India) are doing now on your northern border with China,” the former Israel Air Force Division Commander told StratNews Global Associate Editor Amitabh P. Revi.

“We have criminal activity. We have states wanting to influence each other. The numbers are just staggering,” he explained, saying, “just in 2019, North Korea stole over $2 billion from cryptocurrencies and banks worldwide. The threat growth is over 300 per cent between 2018 and 2019.” Like the World Health Organisation (WHO) helps countries deal with the pandemic, the co-founder & president of Toka, a cyber capacity-building company, said: “we need a global body to cope with the challenges, threats in the cyber, digital domain. The world needs leadership in this space.”

General Rosen also addressed cyber warfare between countries, the threat to critical infrastructure, whether it’s banking, health or power grid structures and the fears of surveillance and data privacy when governments and companies like his ‘defend against terror and crime with cutting edge and lawful intelligence gathering tools’.