A senior civil servant in the Indian government has acknowledged last week's breach of the nation's nuclear computers, but the chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission dismisses claims by a group of teenage crackers as nonsense, and politicians still refuse to comment.
"They have not got anything," R. Chidambaram. chief of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, said Sunday.
However, on Friday, a government source told MSNBC that the nation's most sensitive nuclear weapons research facility was the victim of crackers, who tapped into email servers to steal and erase atomic data. This was backed up by a senior a US intelligence official, who said the CIA had obtained and is reviewing the hacked material.
A highly technical email purportedly obtained by the crackers, and reported on by Wired News last week, was analyzed for MSNBC by David Albright, director of the Institute for Security and International Studies, who said the email shows evidence of civilian rather than military nuclear research.
In an Internet Relay Chat interview with Wired News last week, the crackers said they attacked the Indian nuclear program's servers to protest the nation's recent nuclear tests. They claimed to have downloaded several thousand pages of information, including research papers and scientists' email sent in the weeks immediately preceding and following weapons testing last month. They also said they erased data on two of six servers at the Bombay facility.
The crackers' claims came a day after a Pentagon official warned about the potential dangers from terrorists who might manage to break into computer systems.
