Why Is It Important To Ban Chinese Applications In Indian Market ?

By Smith Gonsalves

The threat perception from Chinese generated cyber capabilities has gone up exponentially. At the same time, the decision by the government of India to ban 267 Chinese applications is one of the boldest decision ever taken. This may ruin the Chinese policy acting as a dumping ground in the Indian market.

Another Interesting part about Chinese regime is it has groomed different companies under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Doctrine, where the objective is to penetrate the adversarial market via direct and indirect means and try to provide the service/product for a cheaper cost. These products come with either embedded malware inserted on hardware and network-level routing the traffic and the information towards Chinese counterparts mostly their India centric units of combat and armed forces like Unit 61398, Unit 61486, Unit 78006 this concept is called as Civil-Military Fusion.

There have been various reports of different analysis by International cyber intelligence companies like the FireEye on the cyber capability generated by Chinese counterpart.

Even we have seen the identification of various new-age vulnerabilities or techniques through which it has been shown possible to infiltrate and Exfiltrate critical users information out from these Chinese companies and application, there might be a scenario that these loopholes can be purposely kept for abiding the regulators and providing vital information to Chinese agencies.

Most importantly the decision taken to ban these applications should not only be seen from controlling their overall market spread but most importantly this will lead India to be self-reliant & possess resilience capability.

We hope to see the government coming strong on these issues affecting the citizens’ privacy, even the pending Data Protection Bill should prioritise which will help our judicial systems to hold these adversarial companies accountable.

What Precautions Netizens Should Take?

• Make sure to check what all applications are installed on the mobile phone, what is the rating of the appl and the developer’s details. Avoid Chinese application by cross-checking the name of the developers.
• Check what permissions have been assigned to applications which are installed on phone.
• Try Identifying alternative of Chinese applications, uninstall Chinese applications which are removed from play store.
• Don’t download blacklisted Chinese apps from third-party sites or store.
• Reduce the purchase of Chinese hardware particularly the companies incorporated in China.
• Also, having antivirus or a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution is considered to be a better solution.

— Smith Gonsalves is COO & Head of Cyber Operations (CyberSmithSECURE Pvt. Ltd)  & Technical Advisor (Information Sharing & Analysis Center A Public Private Partner With Government of India)