Hackers Access Indian Nuclear
Research Facility
WASHINGTON, DC, U.S.A., 1998 JUN 3
(Newsbytes) -- By Bill Pietrucha, Newsbytes.
Saying that "the world is lucky we're so nice,"
members of the hacker group Milw0rm, who
earlier today broke into the local area network
(LAN) of India's Bhadha Atomic Research
Center (BARC), proved the fallacy of firewalls
and network security systems in the worst
possible way by retrieving information on
India's nuclear weapons program.
"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 (IRC)
with John Vranesevich, founder of the Anti
Online Web site, antionline.org .
"We have information on their weapons, their
test projectories (sic), everything, and we are
doing this from all over the world," another
Milworm hacker, JF, said. "They are not
secure, Milw0rm are beating them, this
shouldn't be happening."
The group broke into BARC's local area
network through its Web site at
barc.ernet.in which was connected
to the LAN, Vranesevich told Newsbytes.
"There was a firewall, but it wasn't configured
properly and Milw0rm managed to bypass it,"
he said.
The group was able to access e-mail between
the BARC scientists, as well as a list of
planned nuclear projects and other files related
to India's nuclear research program.
The Milworm group, however, which includes
the online aliases of JF, Hamstor, Keystroke,
savecore, Venomous and ExtreemUK, also
said some of the files pertain to a group of
experiments called the Neutron-Gamma
Coincidence Studies.
Giving the names of scientists from BARC and
other Indian research centers, including Dr. S.
K. Basu, Sri S. Chanda, Sarmishtha
Bhattacharya, Prof. M.B. Chatterjee, Prof. H.
C. Jain, Dr. P. Joshi and Sri. R. Palit, as proof
of their break-in, Keystroke said that "it's
security was uhm lacking... severely lacking."
One piece of e-mail retrieved by the group that
was shown to Newsbytes detailed a
conversation about increasing the yield of
gamma rays in Pm141, an isotope of the rare
earth element Promethium.
"The slight increase in the yield of 882 (keV
gamma ray) in our alpha data could be
accepted because at lower energy, the
population of the isomer may be more which
stabilses after some threshold energy of the
projectile," the e-mail said.
The group said it is "still contemplating" what
to do with the information they hacked, "but
we securely have it locked away and we will
be keeping this position until further events
unfold."
"We could use it in a very serious case of
international terrorism and sell the
information," they said, "but as we are not
interested in causing world trouble (he he) we
will hold onto it. We were just angry over the
nuclear tests... if you saw the html we put up
on their Web page (yes we changed that as
well) you can see that we are against the
tests."
Milw0rm also changed BARC's Web page into
an anti-nuclear tirade.
"It just goes to show that 'No' information is
safe, the group said. This is a highly classified
and highly sensitive issue, the recent tests
show that it is no laughing matter."
Underscoring the fact that their hacking was
"no laughing matter," Keystroke said "it'd be
interesting to send some e-mail from the
indian (sic) server to a pakistan (sic) server
saying we're india (sic) and we're about to
nuke them."
The Indian Embassy in Washington,
meanwhile, had no comment on the break-in,
telling Newsbytes they had not heard of the
break-in this afternoon.
Reported by Newsbytes News Network:
newsbytes.com .
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