BARC hacking: Experts sceptical

What happened to the BARC site, Internet experts say, is not at all unusual. Several sensitive sites, including those of the Pentagon, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Office of the CIA Director have been hacked. In fact, in March, the Defence Information Systems Agency in the USA was hacked. DISA is the main agency meant to keep American defence communications running through a nuclear holocaust!

Where BARC’s security was weak, however, was evident in the fact that the hackers got access to e-mail logs. Experts say that correspondence between scientistsshould have been protected properly and if it was to be stored, it should have been stored in a server not directly accessible to the Internet.

As for exaggerated claims by hackers, “it’s the in thing among hacker groups. They hate other groups becoming famous. Everyone wants a share of this publicity pie,” said Bill Pietrucha, who broke the story for the online magazine Newsbytes.

Experts said the claims made by Milworm, the group which first broke into BARC’s network, also needed to be taken with a pinch of salt. Milworm claimed it had downloaded 5 MB of e-mail and correspondence, some of it top secret relating to India’s nuclear program and tests.”

But Pietrucha said he had run by nuclear experts the e-mail messages filched by Milworm and they had said the messages did not relate to the tests or reveal anything significant. In Mumbai, some BARC scientists claim that the job could not have been carried out without the knowledge of US defence officials, a claim that not many are buying. For,although the hackers used the “navy.mil” and the “army.mil” servers, it is virtually impossible to monitor each and every visitor in a server.