No peace yet in virtual world

By Arunkumar Bhatt

MUMBAI, JULY 11. While India is going ahead with its peace offensive as a run-up to the Agra summit and Pakistan is trying hard to underscore the centrality of Kashmir, the cyberwar between the sides continues relentlessly.

A hacker who identifies himself (or herself) as True Indian has done it again. This time he has hijacked the website of the terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, headquartered in Pakistan and operating in the Kashmir valley. Earlier, the victim was a Pakistani semi-official site.

True Indian took possession of www.lashkar-e-toiba.org on Tuesday and still holds the ground, defying attempts to evict him from the virtual post. The hacker has replaced the home page with a screaming headline, Mera Bharath Mahaan backed by the Indian tricolour, animated to flutter.

Like before, this person has not defaced the matter on the site but has given it fresh links leading to newspaper stories reporting inhuman activities of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and also the official website of the Army formation in Srinagar.

The anti-India propaganda is retained but the hacker says, ``click on the link below to have an idea how these brainless fanatics promote anti-India propaganda.''

Several months ago, this person had seized the www.pakgov.org site to put the same slogan and the tricolour but did not remove the picture of Jinnah. After several days he displayed on the hijacked site the methodology of the cyber intrusion.

Pakistan promptly denied that it was its official site and media reports there suggested that the Indians who could not retaliate Pakistan in cyber space had launched a phony site and then `hacked' it. A group of Pakistani hackers calling themselves, G Force, had defaced several Indian sites.

The True Indian who is supposed to be anti-G Force replied by displaying personal data from a computer of a hotelier in Lahore to show the prowess of reaching even sub-domains and far interior networks. Still hacker groups had doubted the veracity of the achievement.

Referring to the controversy, the True Indian now declares, ``this time no technical enquiries will be entertained because I know the truth. My mission is to infuse patriotism and not a technical debate.''

But this self-styled True Indian is not known for keeping his date. He had said that he would be available for a cyber chat on Yahoo at a particular time but many found him to be missing. Now no such virtual meeting only an email address: antigforce@yahoo.com is available.

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