As we hear Marie Antoinette-like statements that urge citizens who do not have cash to use plastic, some unsettling incidents flood the mind. Just a month ago, many ordinary folk had broken out into a sweat as newspaper headlines said that 3.2 million debit cards in India had been “compromised”. The biggest banks in the country where many salaried people and others have their life’s earnings, had been hit.
What is chilling here is the the crippling impact something like this can have if hackers, motivated to create financial unrest in the country, decide to pull the plug on us. A couple of years ago, Sony Entertainment faced some ruthless hacking in the US. Even the 2008 economic meltdown has been dissected by some experts to look for the hand of financial terrorists in the event that brought the US banking system to its knees.
There’s no doubting the convenience of using credit and debit cards, e-wallets and so on. But are we prepared for such destabilising acts by internet-crawlers who operate in dark online spaces that even the most tech-savvy governments are grappling with? The overwhelming message in the country today is that going online will bring every transaction above board by smoking out blackmarketeers. Possibly, in an ideal world. But reality is quite different in a world riddled with hostilities, — political, ideological and so on. And this could (and is) seeping beyond physical attacks on nations into the online world, targeting banking and possibly other infrastructure.
Such threats pre-occupy security experts anyway, so why complicate matters?. Hopefully the Government will undertake a course correction keeping in mind that all things online are not beautiful. If cash can be counterfeited, there lurks a danger behind the convenience of cash being routed though the internet. And the stakes are high here for citizens, as their lives earnings, among other things, stand exposed.
Deputy Editor