India now has the technology to explode nuclear devices and has the whole world worrying about a new and deadly arms race on the sub-continent. However it lacks the expertise to install a firewall correctly to protect the secrets of its nuclear arsenal. That is the conclusion drawn by a team of teenage US hackers who say they downloaded classified material about its nuclear bomb. And the day after leaving the Bhadha Atomic Research Center’s web site with an anti-nuclear message, they broke into the Indian government local area network to plunder the secrets of other servers. It’s ironic that India has weapons capable of destroying the world, but they can’t secure a little web server which is connected to their networks, one of the hackers, called Keystroke, said in an internet relay chat with John Vranesevich, founder of the Anti Online web site, http://www.antionline.org . The group, called MilW0rm, broke into BARC’s local area network through its web site at http://www.barc.ernet.in and claims to have accessed email between the BARC scientists and files related to India’s nuclear research program. The hackers are still contemplating what to do with the information but says they have it locked away and we will be keeping this position until further events unfold. Officials at Barc confirmed their network was infiltrated but maintained: It’s all taken care of, there’s nothing to worry about. According to Anti Online, the hackers accessed the Barc network from an American military server and the Barc logs would show an attack by the US Army system. Given tension in the sub-continent, what would happen if the hackers had jumped from the Indian server to the one supporting the scientists developing the Pakistan nuclear bomb, is too dreadful to contemplate. When Computergram tried to access the Barc server, back came the message the server could be down or not responding. Better late than never, someone was obviously trying to fix the firewall.
