Pakistan and India haven’t had a full-scale war since half a century, but with the advent of the Internet, it seems as though the great rivalry between the two neighbouring countries is set to continue. Although random civilian hackers go about causing havoc on websites owned by their rival’s country in the name of patriotism, but now and then we hear that government-run agencies are also behind some of the hacks.
Now, we are getting word that the Government of India has issued an alert to its most sensitive ministries for an imminent hacking attempt by Pakistani agencies. The ministries of Defence, External Affairs, Civil Aviation, Finance, Power and Telecom Ministries have been given very specific instructions regarding the possible hacking attempt and they have been told to connect all the computers with classified information to intranet. An intranet is basically a much smaller form of internet. It functions on the same principle that a wide range of information and services from the organization’s internal IT systems are distributed across several networks, but an intranet is only accessible to the organization’s networks.
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Indian Express further says that the Home Ministry has instructed to not let any official access to the intranet from those machines. It seems as the Indian Government are really serious about this alert. They fear that Pakistani agencies are going to gain access to this classified information by targeting the headquarters of sensitive security establishments, and they are also under the impression that Pakistanis will use international gateways, so there will be no electronic trace left behind.
Incidents like hacking websites to gain access for classified information are common these days, although government-backed hacks are still pretty rare. Even if governments do indulge in these tactics, they really let the public get wind of this. Recently though, there has been a lot of chatter about Online Warfare since the notorious “Hacking Team” got hacked. The Hacking Team was responsible for supplying a lot of controversial software to countries in order to spy on their own citizens, as well as drastically improve their hacking capabilities. As time goes by and the world gets more connected, we can only expect these incidents to increase in number.
Source: Indian Express
