Severalincidents concerning cyber security have been reported in last 24 hours. From PHP to eMudhra, such cyber security issues have again raised the threats posed in the digital world, which have real life implications. Back home, eMudhra issue has highlighted India’s vulnerabilities.

eMudhra is an Indian digital certification authority, which provides digital certificates that help browser confirm that the website is genuine. Several government websites like Income Tax, Aadhaar issuer- UIDAI and many others use a range of eMudhra’s keys to sign their security certificates. Without this authentication, browser will not allow the individual or entity to complete their task on these government websites.

In the recent security incident, security researcher named Wayne said the security encryption issued by eMudhra’s certificates were extremely weak and could be cracked in seconds. He alerted major technology firms on such vulnerabilities. As compromised keys could allow cyber criminals to issue fraudulent certificates and impersonate legitimate websites, Apple, Google and Mozilla had blocked the certificates in their browsers- Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

Cloudflare- the cybersecurity firm- also deployed emergency fixes across its network to protect users. Though eMudhra said that no negative impact due to such incident has happened and taken remedial measures, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has constituted a special team to investigate the security incident over the vulnerabilities over private keys.

Another global incident involving PHP has led to many government websites going offline across the world. PHP is an open-source scripting language, which is more than 3 decades old, and is used widely across the internet. Globally, more than 70 per cent of websites use PHP.

In a recent incident, two critical vulnerabilities were found. These vulnerabilities could allow cyber attackers to take control of web servers of users without the requirement of any authentication. This incident, which came to light through OpenAI’s latest model, prompted the National Security Agency (NSA) of US to give an advisory for installing latest security updates. “If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommended that organisations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the advisory said.

Several governments including Finland, & Netherland took several government websites offline. These incidents again raise the security threats that are emerging in the digital world owing to artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies. While cyber security threats have always been there, rapid adoption of AI has increased these risks.

Interestingly, AI is finding out old risks in the current digital world, and at the same time, it is also creating new vulnerabilities. Against this backdrop, India as a nation has to create effective defence against such digital risks. Increasingly, several Indians are falling into the trap of cyber criminals.

According to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Indians have lost around Rs 52,976 crore to cyber frauds over the past six years, with nearly 8 per cent of the losses relating to cyber arrest scams. Similarly, trading related cyber scams are on a rise with majority of the losses arising from such events. Apart from individual losses, government agencies are also facing high proportion of risk from digital war waged against the country by enemy nations.

Critical infrastructure projects like airports, dams, power plants and others are regularly facing cyber threats from neighbouring countries. As digital warfare becomes the new normal, India as a country has to devise ways to defend itself from such emerging threats. In this regard, AI can be a great enabler in accomplishing this objective.