NEW DELHI: In what can only be a case of hacking, two photographs ofPakistan’s flag and the neighbour country’s President Mamnoon Hussain wereposted from the Twitter account of India’s Permanent Representative to theUnited Nations Syed Akbaruddin, Zee News has reported.
The pictures were posted during the wee hours of Sunday, and interestingly,the “blue tick” that marks a verified account also disappeared at the time.
The account was later restored along with the blue tick and thequestionable tweets were also removed.
In 2016, a total of 199 government websites were hacked in India, theMinistry of Home Affairs (MHA) had told the Parliament.
In fact, more than 700 websites under the Indian government have beenhacked from 2013 to 2016.
Last year in January, the website of the National Security Guard (NSG), theIndian special forces unit combating terror activities, was also hackedposing unprecedented threat to national security.
The website was, however, blocked immediately by the Computer EmergencyResponse Team (CERT.IN).
As technology has progressed, so has the strategy of terror attacks, andcyber warfare has taken over the battlefield to breach the nationalsecurity.
Addressing the press yesterday, Army Chief Bipin Rawat also focused on theincreasing threat of cyber and information warfare, adding that the Indiansecurity forces are concentrating more in that area.
Cyber warfare is a phenomenon plaguing countries across the world too.Although the culprits of cyber attacks are practically impossible to nab,the source has often been traced to Russia.
Last year, more than 300 Ukrainian companies were penetrated by hackersspeculated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be from Russia, inan attempt to cripple the financial system of the country.
Czech Republic too fell victim to a massive cyber attack, wherein emails ofdozens of its most senior diplomats were hacked. Russian hackers were againthought to be behind it.
Recently, Russian hackers are laying blueprint to hack the internal emailsystem of United States Senate, a report by a cybersecurity firm hassuggested.