Mannan Kakkar | ZDNet
On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said:
As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI
Ignoring the typing error, gaining access to Indian Military’s Intelligence servers is pretty damning for the agency. The hack got covered since the hackers claimed to have acces to Norton’s source code. Earlier today I came across scans of a set of documents that are internal communications between the Indian Military. The documents claim the existence of a system known as RINOA SUR. While I did not find what SUR stands for but RINOA is RIM, NOkia and Apple. And this is where things start to get very interesting, according to the set of documents, the RINOA SUR platform was used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Let’s take a moment for that to digest. Here’s an image from the documents underlining the relevant part:
View the document and read more on ZDNet.
Evidence that RIM, Nokia, and Apple gave backdoors to India is chilling. I look forward to seeing what members of Congress do with this. Will they just huff and puff and threaten to blow the firms’ doors down or will they forego the grandstanding because they want (or already have) the same backdoors in use domestically? Is enabling domestic surveillance the price of doing business? If so, where does that leave us?
h/t, Terminal X via @csoghoian
Update: From Rediff:
[…]
The Indian Army denied the reports that it used the mobile companies to spy on a US Congress-appointed body.
A military spokesperson told Rediff.com on the telephone on Sunday morning that the documents were forged and were posted online with malicious intent.
Read more on Rediff.