Southeast Asia Gears for Cyberwarfare, India Turns to Artificial Intelligence

Tensions in the global political atmosphere are starting to raise concerns about the possibility of cyberwarfare in multiple countries. This is pushing Southeast Asia and countries such as India to amp up their cybersecurity game.

In a report from Hindustan Times, Tarun Wig of Innefu said that while artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to "look for patterns to predict future behaviour," it can also be used to help against cyber threats.

"Cyber warfare isn't a movie, it's happening right now. We [India] lost out on the industrial revolution, we lost out on the defence revolution -- let's not lose out in the cyber revolution," he said.

This is of particular importance to India, who has been in three wars with its neighbors since its independence and the target of cross-border attacks, one of which was back in 2008 when Pakistan-based extremists killed more than 160 people in Mumbai. Now, India wants to make sure it's prepared for attacks in cyberspace.

According to Phys.org, recent developments in the news could raise concern for cyberspace attacks. For instance, 22,000 pages of data about submarines that a French government-owned company was building for the Indian navy were leaked to the media. The Twitter account of the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was also hacked, and the elite National Security Guard's website has been defaced with messages just last month.

Innefu started to come into the picture when the company resolved a test case for a law enforcement agency that wanted to determine the background of an incident involving Indian borders. Innefu trained their machine to read a particular agency's language including abbreviations and tried to make a background on what happened, who were the main players, and how they interacted.

Innefu's newest offering, Prophecy, is modeled on products made by Palantir Technologies. The latter is a private security firm whose founders included PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and with clients that included the CIA and FBI. Although Innefu is so far the only Indian company known to specialize in national security, companies such as Arya.ai and Haptik are also tapping into what appears to be a potential market.