Indian Military

[TNN] After the real world, the armed forces are on a red alert in the virtual world as well. Even as they tackle Chinese troop intrusions on the ground, they are grappling with a sharp increase in online espionage attacks from across the Line of Actual Control as well.Top sources say the Army-CERT (computer emergency response team) recently issued the high alert to all military formations and installations to guard against “focussed large-scale cyber attacks” that are being planned on “internet facing” government organisations, prominent brands and corporate groups.

Quoting “reliable” information, the alert ominously warns the cyber-attacks are likely to be launched from this month onwards. The date mentioned, in fact, is March 31. Effective measures must be taken to protect networks from data-thefts, “distributed denial-of-service attacks”, paralysing computer viruses and the like, it says.

Sources said several military establishments, including the Defence Services Staff College at Wellington, had even refrained from using computers directly connected to internet modems for three-four days over the last week as a precaution. Though the alert holds the cyber-attacks can originate from any country across the world, the suspicion is firmly on Chinese hackers.

This comes even as a group of Canadian and American cyber-security researchers in the new report, `Shadows in the Cloud’, held that China-based online espionage gangs have accessed classified documents from several Indian defence and security establishments.

The defence ministry preferred to remain quiet, only saying that it was “studying the report” which had “lot of grey areas”. Blasting this “clueless state of affairs”, experts said Indian agencies really needed to bolster cyber-security measures as well as sharpen their own cyber-warfare or information warfare skills.

China, in particular, has made cyber-warfare one of its topmost military priorities, with Chinese hackers regularly breaking into sensitive computer networks of countries like US, UK, Germany and India. In December last year, for instance, Chinese online espionage agents had even tried to penetrate computers in the Indian national security adviser’s office.

The new report, for instance, says the researchers came across one Indian encrypted diplomatic correspondence, two documents marked `secret’, six as `restricted’ and five as `confidential’ which were accessed by the Chinese hackers.

Moreover, the “affected” institutions ranged from National Security Council Secretariat and several Indian embassies to the 21 Mountain Brigade in Assam and the Air Force Station at Race Course in New Delhi, which is bang opposite the PM’s official residence.

Apart from files related to India’s surface-to-air missiles systems and Shakti artillery command and control systems, the people `compromised’ included even an officer of the directorate-general of military intelligence.

“Cyber-warfare can be even more destructive than missile strikes, crippling as they can economic, communication and strategic networks and infostructure,” said a senior officer.

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