India is a plum and easy target for cybercriminals and foreign governments, and unless it does something to secure itself, its strategic assets could be compromised
You work for Drewla?” The Chinese spook asked the young Tibetan girl from Dharamshala. She had been arrested on the China-Nepal border barely hours earlier.
“No.”
“LIAR! You come here to make trouble,” the angry Chinese persisted. “You are DREWLA; online network of Tibetan people who know Chinese language. You talk to innocent Chinese people to get information! SPY!”
“No. I am a student. I just wanted to see Lhasa, the land of my ancestors. I wanted to come back,” said the girl.
“READ!” said the Chinese and pushed a dossier across to her. One look and the girl knew the charade was pointless. The dossier contained transcripts of her chats with Chinese people over many years.
“We watch you all the time. We know who you are. We know what you do. Don’t ever come back to Tibet — tell your friends in Dharamshala too,” said the spook.
The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in India at Dharamshala, is trained to resist most temptations, but the routine email is difficult to avoid. If an email from a known fellow Tibetan with an attachment ‘Translation of Freedom Movement ID Book for Tibetans in Exile.doc’ arrives, there is no way The Dalai Lama’s staff isn’t going to open it. They clicked on the attachment, opened a Pandora’s box and brought plague upon themselves.
One of the monks working in the office realised something was amiss. He saw Microsoft Outlook Express open automatically on his machine, attach a few documents to a new email and send it to an address he didn’t recognise. Soon, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile found the Chinese in the know of The Dalai Lama’s negotiating position on various matters. Its Drewla members were being identified by the Chinese Intelligence. They realised they needed help.
When Greg Walton reached Dharamshala in June 2008, the place was ripe with humidity and tourists. For him, this was no pleasure trip though. The Dalai Lama’s Office had called him in. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile had a feeling that the Chinese were watching them.
Recently, when the deadly Stuxnet virus spread across the world — almost wrecking the Iranian nuclear programme — India was up there at number three with 10 percent of all infections.
Corporations, especially Indian ones, need to worry about white collar criminals. These guys hire talent and technology from across the world to defraud corporations. These hackers are dangerous because for them nothing is sacrosanct.
“In many ways admitting to a security breach is like saying you have AIDS, people are afraid to admit they have it,” says Manjula Sridhar, a security researcher and the head of sales at Arcot Systems, an online authentication services provider.
(This story appears in the 23 September, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)