A virtual war on terror

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but in innovative ways.

In the recent incident, NIC officials say that they had managed to track down the IP addresses of the hackers and preliminary investigations revealed that it could be the handiwork of some Chinese people. The cyber attacks mainly targeted the emails of senior ministers and top army officials.

Officials say that the information that the hackers were trying to target concerned defence deals that India was entering into with other countries. This includes the purchase of weapons, future plans and also its military strategy. However, only the minor deals and details have been targeted while the major ones remain secure, officials say.

Government officials say that hacking is not a big thing now. There are systems in place and often, only the very sensitive sites or servers are attacked. “Officials involved in sensitive projects are not allowed to work on the computer network. In fact, the computers installed on the network do not even have pen drives or backups. In case a machine needs to be disposed, it does not go to the vendor. We dispose it off safely at our end,” inform officials.

Typically, each official in the MEA has a backup computer and all sensitive information is present in the offline computer. The official MEA site is hosted at NIC headquarters and is covered by a three-layered security system with impregnable firewalls. “The possibility of it being hacked are extremely remote,” says Shetty. In case a site has been hacked, there are ways of recovering the lost data from NIC’s disaster recovery centre in

Hyderabad.

A site anywhere in the world can be technically hacked when an unauthorised access is made into the main server on which the site is hosted. Once in, the hacker can do two things—either he can disable the website so that it would not be seen by the world or he may put some propaganda material on the server so that whoever clicks on the site will see the planted material and not the official site.