OSINFO - Open Sources Information

M Shamsur Rabb Khan
Freelancer
e-mail: samsur.khan@gmail.com

China's intensified cyber warfare against India is becoming a serious threat to national security. The desire to possess 'electronic dominance' over India has compelled Chinese hackers to attack many crucial Indian websites and over the past one and a half years, they have mounted almost daily attacks on Indian computer networks - both government and private. In October 2007, for example, Chinese hackers defaced over 143 Indian websites. A recent attack on a website called www.cabsec.gov.in, which is the nerve centre of the country's administration, was particularly hostile, due to which the site remained defaced for hours.

Web defacement is the term applied to the unauthorized modification of a website. In its place, other terms, such as web jacking, vandalism, cyber graffiti are also used. Phishing, on the other hand, is a term derived from fishing, and is a fraudulent activity on the Internet to acquire personal information. As in fishing, where the fisherman uses a bait to catch fish, in phishing, the hackers use spoofed e-mails to lure innocent Internet users and get their personal information like bank account number, credit card details, password and so on. According to the Gartner Survey, financial losses due to phishing attacks have risen to more than US$3.2 billion in the year 2007 alone.

In April 2008, Indian intelligence agencies detected Chinese hackers breaking into the computer network of the Ministry of External Affairs forcing the government to think about devising a new strategy to fortify the system. Though the intelligence agencies failed to get the identity of the hackers, the IP addresses left behind suggested Chinese hands. While hacking is a normal practice around the world, the cyber warfare threat from China has serious implications. At the core of the assault is the fact that the Chinese are constantly scanning and mapping India's official networks.

According to India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), in the year 2006, a total of 5,211 Indian websites were defaced, on an average of about 14 websites per day. Of the total number of sites that were hacked and defaced, an overwhelming majority were in the .com domain (90 cases) followed by 26 in the .in domain. As many as 11 defacement incidents were also recorded in the .org domain. Of all hacking incidents in October, about 61 per cent related to phishing, 27 per cent to unauthorized scanning and 8 per cent to viruses/worms under the malicious code category. India, like the western countries, has been witnessing a massive rise in phishing attacks with incidents in 2006 180 per cent higher than in 2005, and the trend carrying through into 2007.

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