The military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), announced a probe into the cyberattack carried out by Indian spy networks on senior government and military officials. The attack involved the hacking of senior officials’ personal cell phones and gadgets in order to extract information.
The Pakistani intelligence agencies have identified the attack carried out by hostile agencies from across the border and are currently investigating the matter.
The ISPR in a statement said: “Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have identified a major cyberattack by Indian intelligence agencies involving a range of cybercrimes, including deceitful fabrication by hacking personal mobiles and technical gadgets of government officials and military personnel.”
Read more: Rise of social media is fuelling interest in cyber warfare
The ISPR further added, the targets of the attack were being investigated. With regards to the measures taken against the officials violating the official SOPs, the statement said, action was being taken against those involved in the violation of SOPs.
Pakistan intelligence agencies foil big Indian cyber attack: ISPR https://t.co/yU6AypVRoL pic.twitter.com/sdZbAifXJr
— 92 News HD Plus (@92newschannel) August 12, 2020
The military’s media wing, in a statement, further said that an advisory is being sent to all government departments and institutions in order to identify lapses and enhance cyber-security measures in place. The Army has “further enhanced necessary measures to thwart such activities”.
Cyberattack: 115 million Pakistanis’ data for sale
Earlier on April 10, Rewterz, a pioneer of specialized cybersecurity services in Pakistan came across a data dump containing information of 115 million Pakistani mobile phone users for sale on the dark web. This raised serious questions with regard to data protection in Pakistan.
The cybercriminal, a VIP member of the dark web forum placed an advertisement, with the asking price for this data dump at 300 Bitcoins (BTC) or $2.1 million.
According to the advertisement description, the telecom database was hacked in April.
Read more: India is raging a protracted hybrid war on Pakistan
Rewterz’s Threat Intelligence team had analyzed some of the samples from the telecom database up for sale on the notorious dark web. The data included personal information of the users such as names, contact numbers, residential addresses, CNIC numbers, and NTN numbers.
The Threat Intelligence team noted that financially motivated threat actors were active in Pakistan and organizations with outdated cybersecurity infrastructure have become an easy target of these actors.
Moreover, Rewterz Threat Intelligence experts believed that the scale of the breach raised questions about the data security and privacy of telecom companies.
Read more: Why Pakistan needs a cyber army?
Recently, Zoom was in the news for the reason that video calling platform do not feature end to end encryption (E2E) despite marketing it everywhere. This allowed Zoom to have access to the audio and video in a private video conference even though it claimed not to.