<p>In what may be construed as a serious breach of India’s cyber security, Chinese hackers had penetrated computers at Eastern Naval Command to access strategic information, though the nature and sensitivity of hacked information is not known at the moment.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The hacking incident happened almost seven months ago, following which the Navy instituted a Board of Inquiry (BoI) against some officers whose computers were bugged and compromised.<br /><br />The Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam is one of the strategically important naval establishment that harbours indigenous nuclear submarine INS Arihant — slated to be inducted in the service next year — and Russian-origin nuclear submarine INS Chakra which joined the service earlier this year.<br /><br />As India plans to build three nuclear-powered submarines, the Eastern Command is also constructing a secret under-water base for them.<br /><br />A Navy spokesperson denied leaking of any information on Arihant to the Chinese.<br />The BoI has completed its investigations and sent its findings to the Navy headquarters which will take a final call on the action to be taken against the officers on the basis of the BoI recommendations.<br /><br />Some data has been lost and efforts are on to find out the extent to which vital information was compromised due to these bugs, officials said. They said the bugs were detected during checks carried out by naval cyber security teams.<br /><br />Not clear<br /><br />Even though the Defence Ministry had earlier adopted a practice of not storing sensitive information in computers, it is not clear at the moment if that standard procedure was followed at Visakhapatnam.<br /><br />This is the second such case of IT security breach in the Navy that has come to light this year. Another BoI recommended action against four senior officers for allegedly possessing and leaking classified information through social networking sites.<br /><br />Four officers from the technical branch were tried by the Board of Inquiry (BoI) for possessing classified information on their personal computer systems. They were also found to be sharing this on social networking sites such as Facebook.</p>
<p>In what may be construed as a serious breach of India’s cyber security, Chinese hackers had penetrated computers at Eastern Naval Command to access strategic information, though the nature and sensitivity of hacked information is not known at the moment.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The hacking incident happened almost seven months ago, following which the Navy instituted a Board of Inquiry (BoI) against some officers whose computers were bugged and compromised.<br /><br />The Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam is one of the strategically important naval establishment that harbours indigenous nuclear submarine INS Arihant — slated to be inducted in the service next year — and Russian-origin nuclear submarine INS Chakra which joined the service earlier this year.<br /><br />As India plans to build three nuclear-powered submarines, the Eastern Command is also constructing a secret under-water base for them.<br /><br />A Navy spokesperson denied leaking of any information on Arihant to the Chinese.<br />The BoI has completed its investigations and sent its findings to the Navy headquarters which will take a final call on the action to be taken against the officers on the basis of the BoI recommendations.<br /><br />Some data has been lost and efforts are on to find out the extent to which vital information was compromised due to these bugs, officials said. They said the bugs were detected during checks carried out by naval cyber security teams.<br /><br />Not clear<br /><br />Even though the Defence Ministry had earlier adopted a practice of not storing sensitive information in computers, it is not clear at the moment if that standard procedure was followed at Visakhapatnam.<br /><br />This is the second such case of IT security breach in the Navy that has come to light this year. Another BoI recommended action against four senior officers for allegedly possessing and leaking classified information through social networking sites.<br /><br />Four officers from the technical branch were tried by the Board of Inquiry (BoI) for possessing classified information on their personal computer systems. They were also found to be sharing this on social networking sites such as Facebook.</p>