Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Fighting in the fifth dimension

Date: 02/07/13


Interpretation of the Documentary Film 'Fighting in the Fifth Dimension' by Al Jazeera


Website link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJQF9gqclgY

This documentary talks about the trending issues on internet faced by the 
countries, their people, their security system and their government officials. This film is directed by Abdallah Et Binni. Over a period of time the major mediums of any kind of war between various countries have been either land or sea or air or space or a mixture of more than medium. However, things have changed, now war has gone through a radical change and followed by these mediums another new medium has come up. This has given a new dimension, namely the Fifth Dimension. This war can be lead without army, tank and any forms of weapon. It just needs a computer and an internet connection, sometimes internet connection is also optional. This war is known as Cyber War.
Cyber War is prevalent in both developed and developing nations. In the age of globalization and digitalization of information, the information society is very powerful. Citizen Journalism which was considered a novel concept a few years back is no more novel and it is as regular and ordinary as other modes of journalism. Citizens across the globe irrespective of their journalism background has the liberty to report an incident or development in the form of either taking photographs, recording video or writing an article. Citizen Journalism is very much prevalent in Social Networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.
Since the advent of Facebook it has revolutionized the whole concept of information dissemination and feedback. It takes just a matter of seconds where one information from one country is put on the website and users from rest of the countries can access that information. As users are sharing their personal and professional information on Facebook, there was a serious accusation being raised against it was of spying people. It was being accused of breaching the norms of privacy.
Cyber Security has become one of the important measures to be taken by every country. Everyday, every hour, every minute and every second countries like the USA, China, India, Japan, South Korea and many others share or release billions of data or information on websites and social networking websites. Recently the USA has invested 30 million dollars to deal with cyber security. Other than Facebook, other common mediums of information sharing on internet are Youtube and Twitter. A study was being conducted and was found that the effects of Twitter in getting response from people on sharing information is almost 10 times more than traditional medium.
Various government organizations like FBI and CIA deals with around 10 billions of data every hour. So, it becomes very important for any government organization to take measures against Cyber breach. The main objective is to control the situation where data are being hacked by the hackers followed by crashing of the systems. From another article published by Reuters named 'UK teams with defense and telecom companies on cyber security' we can see other than the USA, how UK has also kept cyber security as one of their top priorities when it comes controlling the data on the internet. The website link of the article is as follows:

http://news.yahoo.com/uk-teams-defense-telecom-companies-cyber-security-053054946.html

This article written by Brenda Goh talks about IT and telecom giants like BAE systems, Rolls Royce, Lockheed Martin and Hewlett Packard have come forward to team up with Britain to strengthen the country's cyber security. system. They are teaming up with the government to share information on tackling cyber threats. This project is known as Defence Cyber Protection Partnership which will extensively work to control and share threat intelligence on the internet. This will lead to a better cyber security in the country.

In another article called 'Cybersecurity training on the rise for young students' written by Robert R. Ackerman Jr. talks discusses about the importance of youths in handling the issue of cyber security. The website link of the article is as follows:


http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/07/02/cybersecurity--training-on-the-rise-for-young-students/2482445/

In the USA the young people have growing number of opportunities on cyber education starting even before the college level. This will help them to combat the terror of cyber war followed by a great career in cyber security. Some of the organizations have started Corporate cyber security internships where the young people will be taught about various aspects of cyber security. Northrop Grumman Corp. and Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) at the University of Maryland are the worth mention bodies which have taken this initiative.

So, it can be seen Cyber war is the most discussed form of war which has the power to shut down a nation's economy only with a computer. There are viruses like 'Stuxnet' which even don't require an active internet action to bring down computers. The first signs of this virus infecting the computers was found in Belarus. This virus can be easily transferred from one computer to another through devices like USB drives. Even if a specific system is not hooked up to internet this virus is effective to infect the information in the computer. Later it was found that this virus was a product of a joint venture  undertaken by the USA and Israel to sabotage the Uranian and various Research Programs conducted in Iran.

At present every country is suffering from the threat of Cyber War. Developing countries like India is also taking strong actions to combat against this war. Recently the Information and Broadcasting department released an updated NATIONAL CYBER SECURITY POLICY where the issue of cyber security has been taken into strong consideration.

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