Bangalore:

The Indian Naval computer systems that has been established at Visakhapatnam, the headquarters of Eastern Naval Command, got discovered to be infected with a virus, said a report appeared on the Indian Express.

The bug which is said to be planted by Chinese hackers secretly collected and transmitted confidential files and documents to Chinese IP addresses.

Along with the Navy’s resources, other cyber forensic agencies were also involved in tracing the hackers, and the sources say that China has already been accused of using “cyber battalions” — specially trained military staff — to break into confidential computer systems worldwide.

This cyber espionage came to light at the beginning of this year while the Eastern Naval Command is planning operations and deployments in the South China Sea and beyond, and India’s first nuclear missile submarine, INS Arihant, is undergoing trials at the Command, the report said.

The Naval headquarters in New Delhi is looking into the case closely, since several other sensitive projects are also being undertaken at the Eastern Naval Command situated at Visakhapatnam besides the Arihant trial.

 “An inquiry has been convened and findings of the report are awaited. It needs to be mentioned that there is a constant threat in the cyber domain from inimical hackers worldwide.” this was the response from the Navy officials regarding the report. The official sources confirmed that an amount of data had been leaked, however, and this breach might have happened due to the use of pen drives that are prohibited in Naval offices.

But the fact to note is that like other armed forces, the Navy stores sensitive data only in standalone computers that are not connected to the Internet and these computers are not supposed to have ports or access points for pen drives or external storage devices.

However, the virus in fact created a hidden folder and collected specific files based on certain ‘key words’ that it has been programmed to identify, after which the bug sent these files to specific IP addresses.

Read on to know about the previous breach attempts by hackers on Indian Navy