Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that terrorists are using darknet, metaverse, as well as cryptocurrency to fulfill their nefarious aims which can have implications for the social fabric of nations. In an interview to the news agency PTI, the PM said that global cooperation in fighting cyber crimes is not just desirable but inevitable. He said that cyberspace has introduced an entirely new dimension to the battle against illicit financial activities and terrorism.
"Terrorists using darknet, metaverse, cryptocurrency to fulfil nefarious aims; can have implications for social fabric of nations," PTI quoted the PM as saying.
Prime Minister said that cyber threats must be taken very seriously, adding that "cyber terrorism, online radicalisation, money laundering just tip of iceberg".
He also focused on the issue of disinformation and fake news and said, "Fake news and deep fakes can cause chaos and loss of credibility of news sources, can be used to fuel social unrest." He added that there is a need to achieve a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of ICTs for criminal purposes.
PM Modi noted that India hosted a G20 Conference on Crime and Security in the Age of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Artificial Intelligence and Metaverse in July in Gurugram.
He said that concern was expressed over malicious cyber activities contrary to established norms, principles and rules of cyberspace and international law during this conference
“Because the threat dynamics are distributed – handlers are somewhere, assets are somewhere else, they are speaking through servers hosted in a third place, and their funding could come from a completely different region. Unless all the nations in the chain cooperate, very little is possible,” he said.
This comes as global agencies fight the increasing cyber-attacks on various systems. In May this year, security firm Radware pointed out that hacktivists claimed 480 distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks targeting Indian websites in just the first three months of this year, making it the most targeted country, reported LiveMint.
According to a German digital association Bitkom report, the theft of IT equipment and data, as well as digital and industrial espionage and sabotage, will cost Germany 206 billion euros ($224 billion) in 2023, reported Reuters. It added that the damage will surpass the 200 billion euro mark for the third consecutive year, according to a Bitkom survey of more than 1,000 companies.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) working under the Union Home Ministry recently sounded alerts over fake emails in circulation impersonating as CEO I4C and cautioned government employees and other individuals against such emails and not to respond to them.