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Quoting unnamed government sources, a recent report by the Times of India -- the country's largest circulation daily newspaper -- said China has been mounting cyber attacks, particularly on government Web sites, for the past one year, adopting hacking and other intrusive methods. But over the last few months these attacks have become particularly fierce and almost daily.
Many major attacks have been traced back to Internet Protocol addresses of servers in China believed to be under indirect control of the People's Liberation Army. These have included attacks on the National Informatics Centre, the information technology backbone of the Indian government, the Web site of the Ministry of External Affairs, and the Web site of the Cabinet secretariat.
An attack on this Web site -- www.cabsec.gov.in -- on Sunday was particularly hostile, says another report, according to which this nerve center of the country's administration was defaced for several hours.
"Government officials say the attacks are not isolated incidents of something as generic or basic as hacking," said the report. "They are far more sophisticated and complete, and there is a method to the madness."
The report added that using three main weapons -- bots, key loggers and mapping of Indian networks -- Chinese cyber intruders try to constantly scan and map India's IT networks, not only to get a "very good idea of the content" but also "to disable the networks or distract them during a conflict."
Bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, they perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in Web spidering, where an automated script is used to fetch and analyze information from Web servers.
Keystroke logging, or keylogging, is capturing and recording the keystrokes of a user. While keylogging is highly useful for law enforcement it is also a powerful espionage tool that could be used to extract passwords or encryption keys and thus override security measures.
Publicly, of course, all that officials at the NIC and Cabsec were willing to admit to UPI is that attempts to breach security were a "regular phenomenon," and neither of the two organizations were "authorized to comment on security matters" of government-owned Web sites. However, the local press claims that privately all acknowledge that Indian Web sites are increasingly coming under threat from Chinese hackers.
Chinese officials early this week dismissed these reports as "baseless." But India is not the only country that has been accusing China of waging cyber warfare.
Fingers of accusation were earlier pointed, in fact, by the United States. Last September the New York Times revealed that a confidential Pentagon report alleged that Chinese military hackers had prepared a detailed plan to disable the U.S. aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack.
"The blueprint for such an assault, drawn up by two hackers working for the People's Liberation Army," said the report, "is part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve electronic dominance" over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the United States, Britain, Russia and South Korea.
Still earlier that year, in May 2007, Germany discovered that the computers of Chancellor Angela Merkel's office and three of her ministries had been hacked into by Chinese hackers. And while the Pentagon was reeling under the Chinese attacks in September, the British government too disclosed that it's Foreign Office and a few key departments in London had been hit as well by hacking units traced to the People's Liberation Army.
Cyber attacks by China in India are however far more widespread and are not just restricted to government-owned Web sites. In fact China has been actively monitoring politically sensitive Web sites like those of the Tibetan Technology Center (www.tibtec.org), an organization run by the exiled Tibetan community in India. According to Phuntsok Dorjee of Tibtec, Tibetan-run Web sites are constantly hacked into, with the IP addresses of the hackers often traced to China.
For that matter, at the peak of the latest Tibet-China tumult in March this year, China was accused of blocking Google News and YouTube for a week in an attempt to control the flow of anti-Chinese propaganda.
Experts say that although Beijing vehemently objects to all allegations of state-controlled cyber snooping and hacking, contrary to international diplomacy norms the Chinese government as well as its society hails the practice of hacking for the national cause. The so-called Honker Union in China, formed in 1999 in retaliation to the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, is a testimony to that fact. The Honker Union is an informal association whose members conduct free and widespread hacking under the guise of patriotism and nationalism, mostly on government-related Web sites around the world.
Most countries treat Chinese cyber attacks as snooping or security breaches, but in India these intrusions are considered as the equivalent of Internet-based terrorist attacks. At an army commanders' conference held in New Delhi early this month, the Indian Army declared that as it is facing mounting attacks on the country's networks, the army is now gearing up to fight digital battles as well.
According to General Deepak Kapoor, who chaired the conference, the army has already ramped up the security of its information networks right down to the lowest division level, while the Army Cyber Security Establishment has started conducting periodic cyber-security audits as well.
The Indian forces are also trying to enhance their C4ISR -- command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance -- capabilities, so that the country can launch its own cyber offensive if need be.