High-level Indian bureaucrats may have been attacked by Chinese hackers

The lurking threat of China has made the Indian government uneasy for decades, and more so in the recent times. And now, it has been found that personal computers of some high-ranking diplomats in the Indian bureaucracy may have been attacked by a Chinese hacker group called Danti, a report by the Kaspersky Labs indicated.

The software security company claims to have tracked a malware, which was used to steal sensitive information from computers of officials in the national capital and in Indian embassies.

The malware, written in the Mandarin language, was sent via phishing emails and comments that had names of top-ranking government officials. The team tracked the malware strain to computers used by Cabinet secretariat of the Indian central government, and also to Indian embassies in Hungary, Denmark, and Colombia.

"These hackers have a special focus on diplomatic entities. We presume they may already have full access to internal networks in the Indian government," Kaspersky Labs Southeast Asia managing director Altaf Halde said.

The officials of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) admitted to have been attacked by a “big” cyber phishing racket, but refused to reveal any details due to sensitive nature of the information.

According to official sources, the computers of the Union Cabinet secretariat is known to be one of the targets, but the bug has now been fixed.

This is not the first time that Chinese hackers have targeted Indian systems with malicious attacks. Last year, US-based cyber security firm FireEye reported that Chinese hackers had been targeting Indian Government machines to get data on India’s border dispute with Pakistan and other diplomatic matters. The Chinese hackers have also reportedly attacked US systems twice and broken in to private data of millions of US intelligence and military personnel.