Cyber espionage: Chinese hackers steal India’s secret files

TORONTO - Secrets files of India’s missile projects, troop deployments and military schools have been stolen by hackers of the so-called `Shadow Network’, exposing unprecedented Chinese cyber offensive against India, dozens of other nations and the Dalai Lama, says a report by Canadian investigators.

In what has been termed the world’s biggest cyber spy ring, the Chinse hackers used simple methods of e-mail and Twitter to steal secrets from computers around the world, says the report “Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage 2.0″ released here Tuesday.

In their year-long investigation, the researchers recovered India’s national security files carrying information about anti-aircraft, surface-to-air Pechora missile project, the Iron Dome missile system, and artillery’s Project Shakti.

In total, as many as 78 stolen Indian military documents and two National Security Council documents were recovered in the investigation. These also included files about India’s military training schools and deployment of troops.

“I thought, wow, that’s the whole Indian defence establishment,” researcher Greg Watson, who went to India as part of his field research for the investigation, was quoted as saying.

In the cyber offensive on India, files were also stolen from computers of the Tatas and YYK India.

The investigation also recovered visa applications stolen from Indian missions in Moscow, Kabul, Dubai and Nigeria.

“Additionally, sensitive personal, financial and business information belonging to Indian officials (at its missions) was systematically harvested and exfiltrated by the attackers,” the report said.

But the computers of the Dalai Lama were the most hacked as investigators found stolen files, which included all emails to and from the Tibetan spiritual leader in 2009.

In their global-spanning operation, the Chinese hackers used a network of `botnets’ or remotely controlled computers linked to servers in China to steal secrets.

The report comes a year after reports of China-based GhostNet hacking into servers of Indian government and missions abroad, dozens of other countries and the Dalai Lama’s offices. China had denied any involvement in GhostNet that hacked into 1,300 computers in more than 100 countries.

Prepared by the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, Canadian security firm SecDev Group and US-based cyber sleuthing organisation Shadowserver Foundation, Tuesday’s report put the Chinese government once again in the dock over cyber espionage.

“Essentially we went behind the backs of the attackers and picked their pockets,” Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at Toronto University’s Munk School of International Affairs which investigated the spy ring, was quoted as saying.

(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)