India too was the target of Chinese hackers

Posted on 08-02-2010

At about the same time as Google and many other companies reported that being attacked by Chinese hackers, India too seems to have suffered from an attempt at the National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan's Office.

On December 15th, Narayanan claims than multiple government departments were targeted with emails which contained infected pdf files, which contained a Trojan. Opening these could compromise the computer potentially giving a third party to remote access.

According to Narayanan, “This was not the first instance of an attempt to hack into our computers," he also said that "It is difficult to find the exact source but [China] is the main suspicion. It seems well founded.”

As a result of the hacking attempts Google had decided to shut down its operations in China, and it was believed that Beijing itself was behind the hacking attempts. The Chinese government of course denies any involvements, and instead claims that it itself is the victim in these attacks.

Narayanan also said that India is cooperating with the US in an attempt to strengthen its own security. None of the computers compromised in the attack were part of the secure network, and for now, the major threat is still from militants in Pakistan.

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