By Ram Srinivasan
The Indian government has released information that Indian websites, over the last 18 months, have been subject to online assaults originating from communist China.
In the highest-profile case in early April, Chinese hackers broke into systems owned by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). The ministry does not think that any sensitive information was accessed, but they believe there was indeed a data breach.
India’s most read newspaper, the Times of India, reported the cyberattacks prominently and in detail a few days ago. The report comes at a time when India-China relationships are showing strain.
Initially, the Chinese regime’s handling of the Tibetan monks’ protests irked India, which is home to the world’s largest Tibetan exile population, descendants of the Tibetan diaspora sparked the Chinese regime’s crackdown in Tibet in 1959.
The relationship between the two countries grew more tense last week as satellite images released by British intelligence showed massive Chinese submarine deployment off Hainan island, stoking long-standing fears that massive Chinese navy deployment heading towards the Indian Ocean region may become reality.
Speculation is rife that the release of the cyberattack information was not a coincidence, and that the Indian government is planning to invest more in defending against cyberattacks.
Senior government officials interviewed by the Times of India have said that the attacks go far beyond what would be considered generic “hacking”. Several of the ministers, in private interviews with the newspaper, stated that the pattern of the attacks is very eerie and sophisticated, and that there is no doubt that a powerful group is coordinating these attacks.
The largest attacks over the last few months disabled key functions of critical government infrastructure on host computers run by the National Informatics Center (NIC), which hosts the National Security Council as well as MEA.
The steady scanning of these government networks by computers inside communist China, has alarmed security officials, since this scanning enables the attacker to learn the network’s topology.
The attackers are primarily using bots, keyloggers and scanning networks to penetrate the Indian systems, interviewed officials said.
Government officials interviewed by the Times of India said that the attacks offer a way for the Chinese regime to gain “an asymmetrical advantage” in any possible warfare.
