It's war, in cyber space at least

Pakistani hackers are loading lethal worms on music download websites which are accessed by a large number of Indians

The guns on the border may not be blazing but the hits are getting intense, in the virtual world at least.
There is nothing new in the fact that Indian websitesu00a0both government and popularu00a0are the favourite targets of Pakistani hackers. But this time they are putting up lethal virus programmes on popular Pakistani websites which are accessed by a large number of Indians too.

"The attacks increased manifold in the month of November, 2008. A similar spurt in such cases was reported after the Parliament attack in 2002 when India mobilised its defence forces," said a Home Ministry official, requesting anonymity.u00a0u00a0

The intelligence agencies have also expressed their concerns over rogue Pakistani websites and hackers.

MiD DAY had recently reported that a group called Pakistan Cyber Army (PCA) hacked some critical Indian websites, including state-owned energy major Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), Indian Railways and Kendriya Vidyalaya.

"The virus programmes, which are being spread through popular Bollywood songs and movie websites, multiply in a very short time and infect a large number of computers," the official added.

Cyber crime experts said the Pakistani hackers are using a wider computer network to hit our economy.
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"They are specially targeting corporate and government computer networks to siphon off important data and official information. It's like sabotaging the economy by attacking individual units or companies," said Rajat Khare from Appin Security.

Sunny Vaghela, a cyber crime expert, said: "There are over 12 lakh Indian users who frequently access Pakistani websites for downloading songs and movies."

He added that lethal programmes like Botnet and Zoombe are being used to attack our cyber space. "songs.pk is one of those popular websites which are laden with some of these deadly virus," he said.

Vaghela pointed out that regular anti-virus softwareu00a0 don't work against such programmes as these are comparatively new.