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India tightens security for nuclear installations amid ongoing conflicts
Puja Das New Delhi
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India is tightening security at its nuclear installations, including power plants, fuel fabrication facilities, civilian research reactors, and military bases.
This decision follows Operation Sindoor and the Israel-Iran conflict, which have raised concerns of potential nuclear threats, according to two senior officials.
Operation Sindoor was launched by India against Pakistan on May 7 after a terrorist attack killed 26 civilians and tourists in Pahalgam on April 22.
On the other hand, the conflict between Israel and Iran escalated on June 13.
Last week, a high-level meeting took place in Delhi that included the department of atomic energy, and security agencies
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India Today
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As in Russia's war on Ukraine and the recent Israel-Iran war, this whole spectrum played out during the recent face-off between India and from the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22 and continuing through Operation Sindoor and the four-day conflict between the two neighbours (May 7-10), India faced an unrelenting wave of cyberattacks, primarily by Pakistani groups backed by Islamabad and Beijing, but also from hacker groups in Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia and West Asian countries. According to Indian government sources, these groups launched over 1.5 million cyber attacks targeting a wide swathe of India's critical infrastructure spanning defence, power, telecom, finance and transportation during this period. In a cabinet meeting in early June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put the number of attacks at 100 million. Predictably, India's military-industrial infrastructure came in for special attention, while the power ministry confirmed that over 200,000 cyber attacks on the Indian electricity grid were foiled between May 7-10. Their modus operandi comprised the full repertoire of hackers' mischief: website defacements, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (aiming to overwhelm and impair a target server/ network), malware distribution (using viruses to infect systems and gain control) and phishing (use of deceptive emails to extract information). Their cumulative goal: to steal defence information, particularly missile technology, and to undermine vital sectors. 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Websites of several Indian military, defence production and defence research institutes, including the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), were successfully targeted. Clearly, more needs to be done to beef up India's cyber-security, as attacks on Indian cyber space Wig, CEO of Innefu Labs, an agency that works closely with the ministry of defence (MoD), agrees that the attacks are a clarion call for the country's defence mechanism. 'These invasions are no longer just for ransom. They target critical infrastructures, steal sensitive data and attempt to disrupt essential services,' he says. BARRAGE OF ATTACKSJaijit Bhattacharya, cyber-security expert and president of the Delhi-based Centre for Digital Economy Policy (C-Dep), says that the Pahalgam terrorist attack served as the ignition point for the hybrid war—an orchestrated blend of terrorism and cyber aggression—unleashed against India, signalled by a storm of attempted cyber intrusions and disruptions. 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Experts believe that Beijing's objective was to probe India's cyber resilience during a potential military decentralised group called R3V0XAnonymous launched abortive DDoS attacks on the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs and the Income Tax Department. Sensing the danger early on, the Bombay Stock Exchange issued a cyber-security advisory on May 7 following warnings from CERT-In about ongoing cyber threats targeting India's banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) distribution networks in western India were also probed by malware variants, prompting precautionary shutdowns in some areas. On May 10, the official website of the Ulhasnagar Municipal Corporation in Maharashtra was hacked. INDIA'S RESPONSEadvertisementFacing attacks on every domain, India's cyber armies—independent and state-backed—launched thousands of attacks on Pakistan. 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Mint
an hour ago
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