[ISN] Beware of the bugs

http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/india-cyber-security-at-risk/1/191786.html

By Manu Kaushik and Pierre Mario Fitter
Business Today
Feb 17, 2013

In early July last year, a staffer at the secretive National Technical Research 
Organisation (NTRO) noticed odd "signals" on his monitoring system. Using 
complex algorithms that NTRO had been developing since 2010, he categorised 
these signals as a precursor to a major cyber attack. The agency, run under the 
Prime Minister's Office, immediately sent a warning up the chain of command. 
Inexplicably, the warning went unheeded. That mistake would result in the 
single-largest cyber attack ever carried out against India.

On July 12, several high-level officials reported their emails had been hacked 
into. This included officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry 
of Home Affairs, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and the 
Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the paramilitary unit deployed along much of 
the country's 3,500 km border with China. The hackers even breached the main 
National Informatics Centre email server, which serves all government 
departments. An investigation put the total number of hacked accounts at 
roughly 12,000.

The scale of the breach may suggest that the hackers were trying to steal any 
information they could lay their hands on, but NTRO officials believe 
otherwise. "Ministries like Panchayati Raj, Women and Child Development, and 
Statistics were not touched. The hackers focused on the ones with secrets," 
says a senior NTRO officer on condition of anonymity. "They stole secret 
information such as deployment locations of troops and communication between 
ITBP (commanders) and home ministry officials."

Officials say while any number of countries could be after secrets from the 
foreign and home ministries and DRDO, only one would be interested in ITBP - 
China, with which India has a long-running boundary dispute that even led to a 
brief, but bloody, war in 1962.

[...]


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