India's Defence Cyber Agency (DCA) is conducting a week-long exercise to test resilience of India's cyber infrastructure from cyber attacks based out of China.

All three services, including the Army, Air Force, and Navy, along with the Defence Cyber Agency, are participating in the exercises.

These exercises are coming after cyber attacks on All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) last November shut down AIIMS servers for fifteen days. According to various reports, these attacks originated from China.

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, then said in Rajya Sabha that, “It is clearly a conspiracy and has been planned by forces that are pretty significant. It is a sophisticated ransomware attack”.

Forensics reports done by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) indicated that five physical servers of AIIMS were compromised, reportedly from a malware that the Chinese planted in the servers somewhere back in 2014.

The same type of malware was found in servers of military installations in Australia and Japan. 

The malware is installed in servers of critical networks and are kept dormant for several years. They are activated remotely when the attacker wants to extract information or cripple cyber infrastructure of the target.

The QUAD countries of India, US, Japan and Australia are coordinting with each other to combat cyber attacks originating from China. The leaders of QUAD countries also agreed to promote cyber awareness and help each other in capacity enhancement to combat cyber attacks in a meeting on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima.

According to a report, servers of India’s national security agencies and services are air-gapped, hence very hard to penetrate but the servers of National Informatics Centre (NIC) are not and are often targeted by hackers to steal confidential information.

These week-long exercises will help India strengthen its digital infrastructure and make it more secure against cyber attacks.