Alert Issued About Possible Hacking Attempt by Pakistani Intelligence

The government on Friday issued an alert to all sensitive ministries about a possible hacking attempt by Pakistani intelligence agencies to 'infiltrate' into the communication network for retrieving classified information.

The advisory has been sent to Defence, External Affairs, Civil Aviation, Finance, Power and Telecom Ministries by the Home Ministry asking them to ensure that all computers carrying classified information were put on "intranet" (an internal communication network) and no official accesses internal on those machines.

The security advisory said that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were particularly targeting headquarters of sensitive security establishments of armed forces, paramilitary forces in order to obtain sensitive information by be-fooling government officials, official sources said.

The Pakistani agencies may be using their proxies in order to run this spy ring and to make any detection and tracking them a near impossible, sources said.

The advisory said since the international gateways are being used for such purposes, it has been impossible to do a back-tracking exercise on these numbers and they leave very little or no electronic trace behind them.

Earlier this week, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said cybercriminals from countries like Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and the US are mostly involved in hacking and launching attacks on computer networks of Indian organisations in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

Prasad said attackers are compromising computer systems in different parts of the world and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual systems from which the attacks are launched.

Written with inputs from PTI