Chinese Hackers Target Indian Government

Cyber security researchers and analysts have uncovered the existence of a spy network based in China that was used to steal sensitive, classified government documents from India - as well data from the Dalai Lama's office and the United Nations.

The "Shadow Network", as this network is now known, has been traced to two people living in Chengdu, China.
China is largely believed to possess a Cyber Warfare Doctrine that is designed to achieve global "electronic dominance" by 2050. With a yearly budget of $55 million allotted for it and over 10,000 hackers working in tandem, China is second only to U.S. when it comes to cyber snooping prowess.

As more details emerge about the intentions of these hackers, it is clear that they had targeted the upcoming Commonwealth games in India. The idea was to make Commonwealth games an utter failure later this year. The plans included studying the network architecture of the entire Commonwealth games IT infrastructure. This includes ticket sales, online registration servers all of which would crash at the time of the inaugural ceremony. The hackers had also looked into tender documents for the Commonwealth games network infrastructure. Intelligence agencies feel this could be for studying vulnerabilities in the system for possible attacks.

This is obviously not the first time India was under from these Chinese hackers. In 2008 and 2009 too, there were many incidences of small attacks on computers of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. As many as 450 computers belonging to the India Government - including that of the then National Security Adviser (NSA) M.K. Narayanan and Deputy NSA Shekhar Dutt and the chiefs of the navy, army and air force besides officials in the defense intelligence agencies were infected. Finally, the infected computers were taken offline and replaced.

As to how the latest attacks happened, the modus operandi was simple. Individuals in the ministries were sent emails from a genuine looking nic.in mail address. The email had a PDF attachment that was infected. Accounts on Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Google Groups, Blogspot and other social-networking sites were used to update compromised computers and to host malware, according to the report.

Isn't it high time that we pull up our socks and deal with this grave security threat?