16 December 2000

PAK HACKERS CLAIM TO CRASH INTO GOVT WEBSERVER

From Jal Khambata

NEW DELHI: Pakistan hackers on Saturday claimed to have broken into the official Indian Government website (www.nic.in) maintained by the Government-run National Informatic Centre, saying it was "Cyberattack No 2 on the Indian IT websites as promised earlier by GFORCE PAKISTAN."

They claimed that the target of their latest attack was the NIC email webserver but nobody at the NIC end was immediately able to confirm or deny whether their email server has been hacked. If the Pakistan hackers have really succeeded, they would have walked away with hands full of lot of mails among the top government officers and ministers, some of which may contain top secret official documents.

They have put their claim on the website:

http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/2000/10/03/theta.alpha.nic.in/

Thanks to repeated assurances by the government and its information technology experts, most Indians may be having confidence that the sporadic attacks on various Indian by Pakistani hactivists can cause little more damage than defacement or temporary shut-down of an Indian site.

But now, ZDnetIndia, a popular Information Technology portal, has, painting a very serious picture, warned against Pak hactivists holding Indian banks, airports and even defence establishments hostage and in the worst possible scenario causing blood and mayhem in India.

In a recent article, the portal says that Pakistani hackers could gain access to nuclear establishments just like some hackers entered the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC)servers a couple of years ago.

What is more worrisome is that the Pak hactivists can even log into air-traffic control servers and crash passenger plane. Cyber warfare doesn't mean zero loss of human life. If it simply means defacing a Web site, it affects a single company. Thus, even in this age, cyber war can still mean death.

Security in cyberspace should be our prime concern, the portal has emphasised pointing towards the December 13 hack of zeetv.com. The Pakistani hacktivists have successfully defaced more than a handful of Indian Web sites since last year.

These hacktivists have a clear agenda -- the Kashmir issue. Is this the beginning of a proxy cyber feud between the two quarreling neighbours? There has been no counter-action from the Indians, except for the Indian Hackers Association that hasn't been in the news for quite a while. Chinese and Taiwanese hackers are also caught in a similar tussle .

"In the very near future, our banking systems, telephone networks, air traffic control centers and even war-time machinery will be so highly networked that the potential security risks will be much higher.

"Cyber warfare is so rapid that it may not give an opponent enough time to "surrender" before permanent and devastating infrastructural and economic damage is inflicted," the article said.

Meanwhile, some IT experts, when contacted, stated that one of the key reasons for the susceptibility of Indian government/official sites was that they were based on propriety software that is a nighmare of serious security experts and a delight for hackers. In fact, it was surprising that the hactivists had targetted so few sites, when due to inherent weaknesses and inertia on the part of "sarkari" IT experts would suggest that some many of India sites are sitting ducks for the determined hactivists. END