Hackers Trying To Steal Defense Secrets From India.
The Intelligence Bureau has sounded a red alert about "intelligence officers of a hostile country'' encouraging their "assets'' working in Indian defence establishments to use CSM devices to pilfer classified information from computer networks.
"There have been reports of increasing number of incidents of leakage of data/documents in defence establishments through the use of pen drives and other digital storage devices,'' says the security alert, issued to the defence ministry as well as the Army, Navy and IAF HQs.
Consequently, MoD has ordered a thorough review of the entire policy on "the entitlement and usage of CSM devices'' in its different establishments, said sources.
While acknowledging the functional necessity to allow some officers to use such devices, MoD has asked for a comprehensive directorate-wise list of pen drives, laptops and internet connections being used in its different offices.
This comes even as the Army is conducting a court of inquiry against a major posted in the strategically-located Andaman and Nicobar Command, who had stored over 2,000 classified and sensitive documents on his personal computer which was "hacked'' from Pakistan earlier this year.
While the major has been cleared of espionage charges, the probe dwells upon how he was in the "unauthorised'' possession of so many secret documents, normally handled by much senior officers, and why he violated cyber-security guidelines, which expressly prohibit such files from being stored on a computer with internet connectivity.
With cyber-warfare being a top military priority for China, its online espionage agents frequently break into sensitive Indian computer networks. A group of Canadian and American cyber-security researchers in their recent report `Shadows in the Cloud', in fact, held China-based hackers were regularly accessing classified documents from several Indian defence and security establishments, as reported by TOI earlier.
MoD, however, says "only certain internet-facing computers, which had no sensitive defence data, were compromised'' by the Chinese hackers. To prevent such incidents from recurring, "a crisis management plan'' has been worked out "for measured response in case of any untoward incident''.
The Defence Information Assurance and Research Agency (DIARA), a nodal agency mandated to deal with all cyber-security matters, for instance, is working closely with national agencies like the Computer Emergency Response Team and the National Technical Research Organisation. The armed forces, on their part, are also on a high alert to guard against "focussed large-scale cyber attacks'' on their networks
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