Chinese hackers infiltrate Indian embassy data

Toronto: China based hackers have infiltrated computers and stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Indian embassy in the U.S. and the Dalai Lama's organization, Canadian researchers said.

A vast electronic spying operation system, which infiltrated the computers, was being controlled from computers based exclusively in China, said the researchers in a report to be issued shortly. But they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved. The group did also not identify the Indian embassies which were targeted.

The office of the Dalai Lama in India had asked the researchers based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their examination unearthed a broader e-spying operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to Indian embassies as well as the Dalai Lama's Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers believed that the e-spying operation, which they called GhostNet, had hacked into the computer systems at embassies of countries like Pakistan, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea. The networks at foreign ministries of Bhutan, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Iran and the Philippines, had been found similarly hacked.