Economic Times, today. We must seriously applaud this article and wonder, are we REALLY secure?

Highlights: -

“We have set up a unified threat management system for the ministry. This simultaneously uses eight levels of protection like firewalls and spam mail filtering,” said a senior official

Really? Eight layers of protection? The NSA should be contacting you shortly to ask how the hell did you do that! Someone’s been reading too much of Digital Fortress, clearly. Oooh!

The circular also discourages using services like G-mail, Yahoo! or Hotmail for official communication. A similar circular, officials said, had been issued in the Prime Minister’s Office in December.

What is G-Mail? :-) I know what is G-Spot, and I know what is Gmail, but G-Mail?

But the matter is even more critical for the foreign office as officials posted in Indian missions abroad or on foreign tours tend to use web-based mail rather than the ministry’s own mail system.

“We have had cases of senior officers using G-mail or other similar accounts abroad for official work, only to find some form of tampering when they return,” the official said, adding people have been told to change their web-mail passwords if they had opened the account during foreign tours.

The missions have been told to use their official mail ID issued by the National Informatics Centre for communication. But several missions have complained that the mail home page was inaccessible due to port blocks by local Internet service providers.They have been asked to contact their service providers to unblock the site.

Really? Government Email address blocked by local ISPs?

But, it gets even better!

In 2008, nearly 100 Internet addresses were blocked, several of them at Chengdu in China, after these were found to be the source of a swarm of attacks on the network.

“An attack could be just a simple mail, which activates a programme to leak data from that computer to another address on the net,” the ministry official said, adding new intrusions were more geographically dispersed.

Of course, your computer will start leaking data, considering the fact that you were dumb enough to click on the mail that promised you nude pics of Deepika Padukone.

“We had some intrusions which were traced to Houston, but we know that Chinese hackers were behind it,” the official said. “It’s a daily defensive war that we are engaged in.”

So be careful guys. Your local Chinese wallah may actually be a hacker in disguise. It does not matter if you stay in Chunnabhatti or Cincinatti. Who knows, there might be a worm in your Manchurian, the real or the virtual kind notwithstanding.

Related to this, I wrote on

  • No Related Post