CHENNAI: Mobile phones now have more computing power than what National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had when they put man on moon, said former director of Global Cyber Security in Department of Homeland Security, the United States recently.
According to Richard H L Marshall, cyberspace is a man-made domain that none can change, but the governments and people could make it safer.
“In India, there is poor awareness about protecting digital assets,” pointed out Marshall. Highlighting how serious United States was in protecting the financial assets of banks, he said the banking sector there had asked a former National Security Advisor to head the security operations.
“The banks in India should take the threat seriously, as the country is now emerging as a wealthy State,” he added.
“The compromise of security happens when the law enforcement agencies don’t share information,” he said, citing the case of the FBI in the US which did not share information. “This makes the bad guys feel safer,” he said.
Talking about the US identifying four People’s Liberation Army Officers for hacking and economic espionage, he said the Chinese wanted to know how they got caught stealing the information. “Why should we teach them to be better in stealing the information,” he quipped.
T V Gopal, professor, department of computer science and engineering, Anna University, said that even state-of-the-art cryptographic tools are not 100 per cent foolproof to protect the networks. “We should know where to go in for paper back up, and where we should focus on technology,” he said.
Core courses on information security should be introduced in the postgraduate level, suggested Gopal, but added that such courses on information security would be too heavy for children in school.