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Conflict takes a cyber dimension

By K. Srinivas Reddy

HYDERABAD MAY 31. Even as India and Pakistan continue to initiate more Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) signalling a new thaw in the bilateral relations, cyber war between hackers of both the countries is intensifying day by day.

While hackers sympathetic to Pakistan have been defacing Indian websites with unfailing regularity and posting anti-India messages, the Indian hackers too have begun efforts to form an Indian Hackers Club (IHC) to retaliate the cyber attacks.

A prolific pro-Pakistan hacker group FBH had targeted more than 30 Indian websites in the last three days alone.

The FBH had even managed to deface Government websites, interestingly one of them belonging to the Department of Information Technology of the Punjab Government. Invariably, messages on the defaced sites have been very abusive in nature.

In a latest development, an Indian hacker NeoX has floated an Indian Hackers Club (IHC) and called upon all `patriot' hackers from India to join the club to retaliate the Pakistani attacks. Interestingly, NeoX has not targeted any Pakistan website in the recent times, but tested his skills on some Indian sites and succeeded in defacing them.

NeoX claims that the defacement of Indian websites was only to identify the flaws and help the net administrators to patch them up. True to his mission, he explained the vulnerability exploited and hyperlinked the patches to be downloaded for the convenience of the administrators. He made specific requests to Indian hackers Nirvana, cOBra, Emperor, ROxx, Xtremist and kinG cOBra to join the IHC.

Although Indian hackers are not as active as their Pakistani counterparts, they did indeed wreaked havoc when they unleashed a distributed denial of service against Pakistan Government websites last year.

The Yaha virus released by an Indian hacker left Pakistan webmasters dazed.

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