Cyber Threat: A Threat to National Security
The world is globalized, and it is not possible for any state now to have a war like before. Today the world is interconnected if one has powered the other tries their level best to gain more power whether it is economic, political or social. It is all taking place at international forum at that forum every state should have strong national security but in current scenario the cyber security of state is linking to the national security indirectly and the fate is cyber security is considered as a sole responsibility of the government only[1]. How is it possible for the government alone to overcome this issue? There is a huge lack of authority in Pakistan who could control the threats because in today’s world only Pakistan is at its lowest to overcome the threats. Like in case of any serious cyber attack there is no one in Pakistan who will took the responsibility of that situation. These situations may harm the national security as there could be an attack on Pakistan’s important data handling organization.[2]
National Security threats not only includes the Cyber attacks to the data or money as simple it comes in context of Cyber terrorism which may happen very easily in Pakistan as there is no protection to such things in Pakistan. Cyber terrorist who are doing all this may have political or religious motives.[3]They may have some demands, or they wanted to just show up their existence to the public and the government. For this purpose, they have resources too because without resources it isn’t possible. A cyber terrorist is very skillful may be more than our imagination, but they live normally within in as they are social because without being social this task can’t be accomplished well specially the task which are projected to harm national infrastructure of a state. They can easily hack the business websites which may result in great loss and in case of hacking of federal banks cause damage to national economy. The fate is there are a lot of methods through which the Cyber Terrorist hide themselves and still do whatever they want
to so, it becomes very difficult to capture them. The Cyber terrorist are highly skilled as well as they are using the advanced techs too for example the viruses which mostly send to us by emails and we are unable to recognize that what it is? It is very difficult for a common person to identify. There is a huge difference between Cyber terrorist and normal hackers. The normal hackers are mostly working just for the sake of money while the cyber terrorists are having a lot of resources and they have tools and techniques too through which they accomplish thier goals. The main purpose of Cyber terrorist is to harm the state and today not even a single organization in Pakistan has the capability to protect themselves from these attacks. The attacks towards the governmental organizations directly harm the national security. [4]The organizations are not thinking for such thing in a way they should be because the governmental organizations are highly vulnerable, and a small Cyber terrorist attack can result in great loss. So, to overcome the threats to national security of Pakistan from Cybercrimes government needs to hire the IT (information Technology) professionals and scholars with a good pay that motivate them to work efficiently to protect their national security.[5]
[1] Paul Wagensell, “Cyber-attacks will soon kill people, Security experts warn”,2019.
[2] James Andrew, “Rethinking Cybersecurity”, a report on Cybersecurity,2018.
[4] James Lewis and Steward Baker, “The economic impacts of cyber terrorism”,2013.
[5] F Farahamand, SB Navathe and GP Sharp, ‘A management perspective on risk of ecurity threats to information system”,2005.
