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Grex Cyberpunk Item 79: Indian Nuclear Research Servers HACKED, compromised, NSA monitors attack in realtime
Entered by morpheus on Sat Jun 6 04:17:51 UTC 1998:

Following is from MSNBC.
 
India^Rs nuclear servers hacked, compromised 
 
Atomic facility breached to protest bomb tests 
 
By Brock N. Meeks and Michael Moran
MSNBC 
 
 
 
      WASHINGTON, June 5 ^W India^Rs most sensitive nuclear weapons 
research facility was breached this week by computer hackers who tapped 
into servers to steal and erase atomic data, senior U.S. and Indian 
officials said Friday. The sophisticated attack on India^Rs Bhabha 
Atomic Research Center in Bombay raised new alarms about the 
proliferation of nuclear weapons data and the security of nascent 
nuclear weapons programs like those in India, Pakistan and elsewhere.   

     THE SPRAWLING BHABHA research center houses several facilities, 
including a unit to extract the plutonium used in India^Rs first nuclear 
test in 1974 and those which followed in April of this year at the 
Pokharan test site.
       Until Friday, the attack on the center had gone unacknowledged 
by officials in the United States or India. U.S. military officials 
told MSNBC that the incident, which began Monday night, may have 
originated from computers in Turkey. In response to the hack attack, 
the U.S. Army early Friday issued an advisory warning ordering Army 
information systems managers to monitor and/or block a series of 
internet provider (IP) addresses suspected of being involved in the 
hack. 
       ^STurkey is the primary conduit for cyber attacks^T the advisory 
noted. 
       
GROUP DID IT TO PROTEST TESTS
       Reports of the hack first appeared in Wired News, an Internet 
site specializing in online developments. The group suspected of being 
behind the attack claimed credit by e-mailing allegedly purloined data 
to a Wired News reporter, James Glave. 
       The hacker group, which calls itself ^SMilw0rm,^T also hacked a 
cryptic message on to a Web page along with a mushroom cloud.
       ^SDon^Rt think destruction is cool, coz its not,^T the hacked 
inscription reads in part.
       Three members of the group, who go by the handles of SavecOre, 
JF and VeNoMouS, told Wired News that they began their efforts Monday 
and did it to protest the recent nuclear tests by India. Milw0rm 
members claim to have downloaded five megabytes of information, 
including e-mails between scientists and research papers. They also 
claim to have completely erased data on two of six servers at Indian 
facility.   
 
 From left to right, K. Santhanam, director of the Bhabha Atomic 
Reserch Center; R. Chidambaram, chairman of India's Department of 
Atomic Energy; and Abdul Kalam, scientific adviser to India's prime 
minister and founder of India's nuclear program.
  
       A senior U.S. intelligence official says the Central 
Intelligence Agency has obtained the material hacked at the Bombay 
facility early Friday and is in the process of reviewing it. 
       A highly technical e-mail made publicly available by Wired News 
was analyzed by David Albright, director of the Institute for Security 
and International Studies for MSNBC. Albright says the e-mail shows 
evidence of civilian rather than military nuclear research. But that 
hardly mitigates the breach of India^Rs security system.
       
INDIA^RS LOW PROFILE   
 ^QWe have no information on this right now. 
^W VASUNDHARA RAJE
India's minister of state for foreign affairs          India has not 
publicly commented on the attack, though Friday in the course of an 
MSNBC chat, Vasundhara Raje, India^Rs minister of state for foreign 
affairs, refused to comment when asked about the alleged attack. ^SWe 
have no information on this right now,^T she said.
       However, the report was verified by a senior CIA official and 
independently by a senior civil servant in the Indian government. None 
of the sources would agree to be named.
       The attack is bound to prove embarrassing for New Delhi, which 
only Thursday was denounced along with Pakistan by the five permanent 
members of the U.N. Security Council for unilaterally declaring 
themselves nuclear weapons states. India has argued that its decision 
was an effort to break what it sees as a damaging monopoly on nuclear 
weaponry held by the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France. 
Pakistan acted in response to its rival, India.
       
 Asia^Rs nuclear genie: Full MSNBC coverage of the South Asian nuclear 
crisis
       
US LEARNED OF ATTACK   
 ^QThey had certain things secured to the bone, and yet other things 
were completely obsolete. 
^W MILWORM MEMBER
         A source with access to senior U.S. Defense Department 
officials in information systems says the Defense Intelligence Agency 
was aware of the hack as early as Thursday. The source also said the 
National Security Agency monitored the hack in real time.
       This source says says the hackers apparently exploited a known 
security weakness in the Sendmail program, the software that routes e-
mail from one computer to another. The source says that the Indians had 
known about the security hole but simply never bothered to fix it.
       That information confirms Milw0rm^Rs own claim as to how they 
accessed the Bhabha computers. 
       ^SThey had certain things secured to the bone, and yet other 
things were completely obsolete,^T Milw0rm member Savec0re told Wired 
News. 
       According to a report on AntiOnline, a Web site that chronicles 
infamous computer intrusions, Milw0rm members are continuing their 
attacks on government computers inside India, though these attacks are 
on unclassified systems, according to the AntiOnline Web site.
       The three Milw0rm members who carried out the attack claim to be 
teen-agers, located in England, New Zealand and Holland, according to 
profiles located on the AntiOnline site. The group hasn^Rt spoken by 
phone to anyone, preferring to conduct its interviews via the real time 
Internet chatting system known as Internet Relay Chat where it is easy 
to hide one^Rs identity and place of origin.
       
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
NBC^Rs Robert Windrem in New York contributed to this report

3 responses total.

#1 of 3 by jcool on Tue Jul 21 11:47:15 1998:

Time Warner was hacked by Legion of the Underground.  They had full control
of the satellites channels and frequencies.  They have screen shots at
AntiOnline.  If you have not visited AntiOnline http://www.antionline.com
it is a very good source of recent hacks.  I think milw0rm has had some
reasonable hacks but hacking their domain host and deleting over 1000 hosts was
uncalled for.  The host was originally hacked to bring down milw0rm's site 
http://www.milw0rm.com which was successful.  There were many roots on the
server before a member of milw0rm rooted.  He proceeded to delete the domains
but not without a fight.  It took him an hour.  This looks bad on hackers.

#2 of 3 by morpheus on Wed Nov 11 06:20:00 1998:

Heh, cool.

Uh, that is all very naughty, and stuff. 

But, technically, I think that is VERY cool :-) 

Much the same way I feel about say a guided missile -- evil device, but 
technically something to drool over.

#3 of 3 by greycell on Mon Jan 27 11:06:04 2003:

can anyone tell me why those kinda brainy people don't apply their mind in
constructive side may be that will earn them name and fame dunno ? regards
mukesh

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