Government issues alert about possible hacking by Pakistani intelligence agencies

NEW DELHI: Government today issued a alert to all sensitive ministries about a possible hacking attempt by Pakistani intelligence agencies to 'infiltrate' into the communication network for retrieving classified information.

The advisory has been sent to Defence, External Affairs, Civil Aviation, Finance, Power and Telecom Ministries by the Home Ministry asking them to ensure that all computers carrying classified information were put on " intranet" (an internal communication software) and no official accesses internal on those machines.

The security advisory said that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were particularly targeting headquarters of sensitive security establishments of armed forces, paramilitary forces in order to obtain sensitive information by be-fooling government officials, official sources said.

The Pakistani agencies may be using their proxies in order to run this spy ring and to make any detection and tracking them a near impossible, sources said.

The advisory said since the international gateways are being used for such purposes, it has been impossible to do a back-tracking exercise on these numbers and they leave very little or no electronic trace behind them.