The Central agencies responsible for securing the country’s virtual space recently managed to intercept communication from a group of cyber criminals, who were plotting an attack on key Indian information infrastructure in August.
And the alert warned that the non-state actors based in Pakistan had roped in cyber criminals from across the globe to target vulnerable Indian networks.
Incidentally, the hacking of the DRDO website in March and the defacing of the 13 websites of the Goa government in July had been attributed to this group.
Sources said that there was a significant increase in the cyber attacks originating from Pakistan and China in the last 2-3 years. And the probe into some major attacks had revealed that Pakistan and China-based hackers were working in unison.
The intercepted communication suggests that non-state cyber hackers, including ‘Pakistan Cyber Eaglez’, ‘X-HaXor’ and ‘xL3gi0n’ had closed ranks to carry out the malicious attacks.
Interestingly, one such group involved in an earlier attack was traced to South Korea. The South Korean government and some of the private websites in the South-East Asian nation had suffered a major cyber attack in June.
Subsequently, Seoul had blamed the cyber attacks on hacker groups based in archrival Pyongyang.
An official said the group under the scanner had claimed that the cyber attack on the Indian computer networks was meant to avenge the hacking of the Pakistan Army website, the Kashmir issue and India’s involvement in Afghanistan.
He said the cyber criminals were using aliases to give the impression that a group of disgruntled Europe-based hackers and not the Pakistan-based groups were behind the cyber attacks.
