01 April,2009 09:28 AM IST | | Lavanya Srinivasan
India needs stricter laws and better cyber patrolling, say pros in the security business
>>China is an unethical hacker
>>India isn't doing enough to protect its info
>>Even novice hackers can read your email
India's indifference to Chinese cyber spying could cost us dear in the future, experts in Bangalore said.
News broke yesterday that the Chinese had hacked into government and private systems in 103 countries.
That country's government peered into computers of Indian embassies and spied on the Dalai Lama, an Internet research group revealed.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0
The Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which carried out the 10-month study, listed out which systems had been hacked.u00a0
Indifference
"Our government says no information was lost though its computers were hacked," said Vijay Mukhi, president of the Foundation of Information and Security, which provides encryption and data protection services.
He believes our intelligence network is not strong enough to stop foreign countries from stealing our information.
"If Pakistan is a terrorist country, China is notorious for cyber terrorism," he said. He fears the problem could go out of hand if we don't curb hacking with a strict hand.
Black and white
Hackers are categorised as 'white hat' and 'black hat'.
"China is a black hat hacker. They steal the entire database. White hat hacking is mostly done by computer administrators to check the security of their systems," said a hacker who described himself as 'white hat'.
Passwords easy
"Hacking and getting a password is really easy, but cracking the database requires skill and a deep understanding of the site," said Kishan Kumar, a techie who can hack into Gmail and Yahoo accounts effortlessly.
Hackers often use software to break into a system. "The other way is to send a virus, which settles in the computer and steals the password," said Kishan. Some viruses mail the ID and password back to the hacker.
"India is the third largest spammer in the world. We need to work on our cyber laws to ensure better safety for everyone," said Rajashekaran, a computer administrator.
Many experts say hacking government websites is easy as they are not maintained properly.
"But a good thing is that we still do a lot on paper here in India, and so not all information is at stake," said Ajay Acharya, who had hacked into his prinicipal's email account in his college days.
Protect yourself from hacking
>>When you first get a new computer, create a new boot disk. Close the write protect tab on the disk once you've created it, then put it in a safe place.u00a0 You may need it in an emergency.
>>NEVER open up an attachment from someone that you don't know.
>>If you use Outlook or Outlook Express for your email program, close the preview pane. The reason for this is that email can be read as "html" code. (web page commands).u00a0 These can contain scripts or commands that will 'add' things to your computer without you being aware of it.
>>A common practice is for one of the "Bad Guys" to send a file, claiming that it is from Microsoft, and it will update, or fix your computeru00a0... NO!u00a0 Microsoft does NOT send out updates or patches.
Victims ofu00a0 hacking recall their experiences
Our website was hacked and all the content went missing. The site started showing errors and all our content was misplaced with porn and spam. It took us months to fix it, and now it's on high security. We have someone to keep a check on our site regularly. Something like this creates a very negative image on a company,u00a0 and we had just started out at that. We hadu00a0 major lossesu00a0u00a0
Subroto Ray, MD Ink designs
We started a website where we had writers coming in to publish their stuff and our site was hacked. We couldn't fix it despite repeated attempts and so we had to get another domain
Ritish Joy who used to write for www.hafta.com
