Hackers Waging the Third World War.

Sri Lanka, Jan. 13 -- Check and strengthen your defences.!

"I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks!"

-Albert Einstein

Even though the Greatest Scientist of the 20th Century could not even guess, now we know how the World War III is going to be fought. The battles of the Third World War will take place not on land, not in the sea,nor in the sky or even the outer space; these battles will be fought in the Cyber Space and the Hackers will be the war heroes.

During the recent past many incidents have been reported which justify the above statement. Chinese government were said to be behind the hackers who attacked Google and 33 other software companies such as Adobe.

State sponsored Cyber Attacks are on the rise according to reports from various news like CNN and BBC. The Stuxnet worm which was first discovered in July 2010 was said to be aimed at the nuclear facilities of Natanz, Iran and that reveals the political nature of the attack. Then there was the Agent.btz worm that attacked Pentagon computers in 2008; it took the Pentagon 14 months to clean their compromised computers.

You may be well aware of the commotion caused by recent Wikileaksincidents among the political circles across the globe. Even though Wikileaks is not known to be sponsored by any particular country or state, the classified information exposed by the website created a severe turmoil in the whole world, which might even lead to war.

In any war it is the civilians, the unsuspecting innocent general public, who pay the ultimate prize. In cyber warfare it is more so. With lots of personal information stored in social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, more and more people using Gmail or Yahoo mail for their correspondence, world citizens are exposed to the threat of hackers and it is not something to be taken lightly. With the spreading of internet to every nook and cranny on earth people rely almost solely on the internet based systems and computers for their communications, financial transactions and socialization. This is an ideal situation for cyber-thieves and cyber-terrorists. Driven by misguided political motives, greed, pride or hatred; these maniacs can cause havoc in the lives of the world population.

There are many organizations in the world, belonging to both government and private sectors, which have been formed to fight against this cyber-terrorism. Many programmers, strategists, intelligence analysts and all sorts of experts are working day and night making preparations to act proactively to minimize the threat. However, in a borderless world, a cyber-village in which all the individuals, businesses and organizations are inescapably entangled in "The Net", it is an extremely difficult battle to win unless you are well prepared in advance.

So we should do just that. It is the duty and the responsibility of all of us to prepare ourselves for the World War III, arm ourselves with knowledge and technologies to defend our personal lives, our businesses, our countries and, in due course, the whole world.

Don't wait, start now.! Start learning about how we might become the targets of hackers and what we can do to prevent their attacks and secure ourselves againstthem.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Daily Mirror Sri Lanka.

For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com