-ADITI RAJ

We have often heard about the word PTSD which is abbreviated as posttraumatic stress disorder. According to WHO, Posttraumatic stress disorder  is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in individuals who have experienced or witnessed a distressing event such as a natural disaster , an accident ,maybe a war or rape or have been threatened with death, sexual assault or serious injury. In 1980,the American psychiatric association added PTSD to the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder(DSM-III)

This kind of stress disorder can affect those people who have personally experienced such trauma which may have affected their mental health in an adverse manner. It can occur in the friends or family members of those who have went through such traumatic event.

What causes PTSD?

When you experiences a tough moment, your nervous system reacts with the fight-or-flight response. Your heart start beating faster and your blood pressure starts rising along your muscles getting tighten, increase your strength and reaction speed .Once the body feels the danger is passed your nervous system calms your body, lowering your heart and blood pressure, recovers to its normal state.

Signs and symptoms of PTSD

PTSD symptoms differ from person to person because everyone’s nervous system and level for stress tolerance can  be different. Most likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder symptom in the hours or days following  a traumatic event. It can even take year before they appear. People having such disorder get triggered by something that reminds them of their original traumatic event, such as noise or an image, a word or even a smell.

While everyone experiencing PTSD differently, there are primarily three types of symptoms which are following

1.Re-experiencing the traumatic event through bad memories, flashback and nightmares

2.Avoidance and numbing , such as avoiding those thing which reminds you of the trauma, feeling emotionally numb and detached from others

3.Hyperarousal which includes sleeping problems, constantly getting irritated, anger issues, self destructive or reckless behaviour

Curative Measures for PTSD

There is no definite care for PTSD ,but there are many types of treatment available that can lessen the symptoms. Also there are various therapy techniques, as well as evidence shows right medication can be beneficial for people struggling with symptoms of PTSD.

These treatment method are used to minimize, or even eliminate, distressing symptoms that people with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder often experience.

Climate change” and “global warming” are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. Similarly, the terms "weather" and "climate" are sometimes confused, though they refer to events with broadly different spatial- and timescales.

Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s climate system observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere. The term is frequently used interchangeably with the term climate change, though the latter refers to both human- and naturally produced warming and the effects it has on our planet. It is most commonly measured as the average increase in Earth’s global surface temperature.

Since the pre-industrial period, human activities are estimated to have increased Earth’s global average temperature by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), a number that is currently increasing by 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. Most of the current warming trend is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) the result of human activity since the 1950s and is proceeding at an unprecedented rate over decades to millennia.

Changes observed in Earth’s climate since the early 20th century are primarily driven by human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, raising Earth’s average surface temperature. These human-produced temperature increases are commonly referred to as global warming. Natural processes can also contribute to climate change, including internal variability (e.g., cyclical ocean patterns like El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and external forcings (e.g., volcanic activity, changes in the Sun’s energy output, variations in Earth’s orbit).

Scientists use observations from the ground, air and space, along with theoretical models, to monitor and study past, present and future climate change. Climate data records provide evidence of climate change key indicators, such as global land and ocean temperature increases; rising sea levels; ice loss at Earth’s poles and in mountain glaciers; frequency and severity changes in extreme weather such as hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods and precipitation; and cloud and vegetation cover changes, to name but a few.

Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. These changes have a broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the global annual temperature has increased in total by a little more than 1 degree Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 1880—the year that accurate recordkeeping began—and 1980, it rose on average by 0.07 degrees Celsius (0.13 degrees Fahrenheit) every 10 years. Since 1981, however, the rate of increase has more than doubled: For the last 40 years, we’ve seen the global annual temperature rise by 0.18 degrees Celsius, or 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit, per decade.

The result? A planet that has never been hotter. Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since 2005—and the 5 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2015. Climate change deniers have argued that there has been a “pause” or a “slowdown” in rising global temperatures, but numerous studies, including a 2018 paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, have disproved this claim. The impacts of global warming are already harming people around the world.

Now climate scientists have concluded that we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 if we are to avoid a future in which everyday life around the world is marked by its worst, most devastating effects: the extreme droughts, wildfires, floods, tropical storms, and other disasters that we refer to collectively as climate change. These effects are felt by all people in one way or another but are experienced most acutely by the underprivileged, the economically marginalized, and people of color, for whom climate change is often a key driver of poverty, displacement, hunger, and social unrest.

Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Normally this radiation would escape into space, but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. These heat-trapping pollutants—specifically carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, and synthetic fluorinated gases—are known as greenhouse gases, and their impact is called the greenhouse effect.

In 2015, for example, scientists concluded that a lengthy drought in California—the state’s worst water shortage in 1,200 years—had been intensified by 15 to 20 percent by global warming. They also said the odds of similar droughts happening in the future had roughly doubled over the past century. And in 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine announced that we can now confidently attribute some extreme weather events, like heat waves, droughts, and heavy precipitation, directly to climate change.

The earth’s ocean temperatures are getting warmer, too—which means that tropical storms can pick up more energy. In other words, global warming has the ability to turn a category 3 storm into a more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes has increased since the early 1980s, as has the number of storms that reach categories 4 and 5. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season included a record-breaking 30 tropical storms, 6 major hurricanes, and 13 hurricanes altogether. With increased intensity come increased damage and death. The United States saw an unprecedented 22 weather and climate disasters that caused at least a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 2020, but 2017 was the costliest on record and among the deadliest as well: Taken together, that year's tropical storms (including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria) caused nearly $300 billion in damage and led to more than 3,300 fatalities.

Global warming can be controlled by Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. Walk, bike, carpool or take mass transit more often. You'll save one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile you don't drive! You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste. A single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

The most important is concern within ourselves.

What is Pegasus?

• It is a type of malicious software or malware classified as a spyware.
• It is designed to gain access to devices, without the knowledge of users, and gather personal information and relay it back to whoever it is that is using the software to spy.
• Pegasus has been developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group that was set up in 2010.
• The earliest version of Pegasus discovered, which was captured by researchers in 2016, infected phones through what is called spear-phishing – text messages or emails that trick a target into clicking on a malicious link.
• Since then, however, NSO’s attack capabilities have become more advanced. Pegasus infections can be achieved through so-called “zero-click” attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner in order to succeed.
• These will often exploit “zero-day” vulnerabilities, which are flaws or bugs in an operating system that the mobile phone’s manufacturer does not yet know about and so has not been able to fix.

What are the types of cyber attacks?

• Malware: It is short for malicious software, refers to any kind of software that is designed to cause damage to a single computer, server, or computer network. Ransomware, Spy ware, Worms, viruses, and Trojans are all varieties of malware.
• Phishing: It is the method of trying to gather personal information using deceptive e-mails and websites.
• Denial of Service attacks: A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is an attack meant to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users. DoS attacks accomplish this by flooding the target with traffic, or sending it information that triggers a crash.
• Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks: Also known as eavesdropping attacks, occur when attackers insert themselves into a two-party transaction. Once the attackers interrupt the traffic, they can filter and steal data.
• SQL Injection: SQL stands for Structured Query Language, a programming language used to communicate with databases. Many of the servers that store critical data for websites and services use SQL to manage the data in their databases. A SQL injection attack specifically targets such kinds of servers, using malicious code to get the server to divulge information it normally wouldn’t.
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Similar to an SQL injection attack, this attack also involves injecting malicious code into a website, but in this case the website itself is not being attacked. Instead the malicious code the attacker has injected, only runs in the user’s browser when they visit the attacked website, and it goes after the visitor directly, not the website.
• Social Engineering: It is an attack that relies on human interaction to trick users into breaking security procedures in order to gain sensitive information that is typically protected.

What are the initiatives taken by the government to tackle the issue of cyber attacks?

• Cyber Surakshit Bharat Initiative: It was launched in 2018 with an aim to spread awareness about cybercrime and building capacity for safety measures for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and frontline IT staff across all government departments.
• National Cyber security Coordination Centre (NCCC): In 2017, the NCCC was developed to scan internet traffic and communication metadata (which are little snippets of information hidden inside each communication) coming into the country to detect real-time cyber threats.
• Cyber Swachhta Kendra: In 2017, this platform was introduced for internet users to clean their computers and devices by wiping out viruses and malware.
• Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C): I4C was recently inaugurated by the government.
• National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal has also been launched pan India.
• Computer Emergency Response Team – India (CERT-IN): It is the nodal agency which deals with cybersecurity threats like hacking and phishing.

Laws in India related to Cyber Security

• Information Technology Act, 2000.
• Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019.
• International Telecommunication Union (ITU): It is a specialized agency within the United Nations which plays a leading role in the standardization and development of telecommunications and cyber security issues.