[ISN] Army hackers say weapons system safe

[InfoSec News]

http://www.newindpress.com/Newsitems.asp?ID=IEH20050526110347

May 27 2005

NEW DELHI: Army has put in force the highest international grade
systems to safeguard the country's strategic weapons firing systems as
well as armed forces highly classified and high-value communications
from tech-savvy hackers.

"We are aware of threats posed by tech-savvy hackers to these vital
systems," Army chief Gen JJ Singh said making it clear that the top
most B-1 security system had been installed for operating these
weapons.

"These meet the top most international standards," Lt Gen Davinder
Singh, the signal officer-in-chief at the Army headquarters said at
the inauguration of the two-day Army-CII seminar on "Information
Assurance and Risk Management".

The Army chief said a frequency-hopping network had recently been
inducted into the armed forces making them secure from hacking and
jamming both from air as well as from ground transmissions.

He said armed forces networks had not only been secured but made
multi-layered at all levels for all situations, including strategic,
tactical battle area, backbone communications and peace-time systems.

"We have developed complete private and dedicated systems, which
cannot be tampered with easily," Singh said adding that with India
being in the forefront in information technology and software, the
armed forces wanted to draw upon this.

Asserting that efforts were constantly on to update information
assurance and information denial systems, the Army chief said a road
map had been set to make Indian Army at par with leading tech-savvy
forces in the next decade.

Cautioning that in future wars the key to success would lie in
information dominance, information denial and information assurance,
he said for this efforts had to be made to make soldiers "information
warriors".

He said cyberspace attacks could be conceived and planted without
detectable logistic preparations, hence measures had to be taken to
safeguard essential systems from this growing invisible threat.

Stressing on having a robust, secure and fail-safe system, the Army
chief said to keep pace with strides in technology, there was need to
go in for a mix of customised and proprietary military equipment which
would be rugged to sustain all kinds of weather and terrain.

Earlier, inaugurating the seminar in which 400 experts from the world
over and major information warfare equipment makers are participating,
Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee called for working out a national
information assurance strategy which would ensure that risks to
national information infrastructure was properly managed.