The story of the modern world will be written on the touchstone of how the cyber threats were handled and resolved by our technologists, technocrats, and the political leaders. We can reach even the threshold level of battling it out, only when we are able to appreciate where we are positioned and the strategy we need to take to resolve it. The execution and its iterative improvement on a near dynamic and real time, would be the key to warding it off. If we are not able to ward it off completely, we would have the strength to battle it out. The battle of cyber attrition would have begun and the see-saw battle will decide our future.
Getting hacked is the new normal. Resilience and only resilience can be the road ahead. The world will have to revolve around these two truisms in the days to come. We were not ready to believe that we are in the midst of a raging cyber security unseen war and that is turning out to be our nemesis. The most recent of the hacks which rang the cyber alarm bells as a result of leak of secret documents, weapon design and sensitive defence data. How did it happen? The data appeared to have been stolen from the device of a former Defence Ministry official. This has been publicly stated as per an analysis by cybersecurity firm Athenian Tech.
What has made it extremely tragic about this hack which comes on the heels of a series of hacks this country has faced in the recent past. The current data leak includes DRDO information, posing huge security risks. The data leak includes a tranche of sensitive defence data which includes, lo and behold, “engineering design of a weapon, details of new Air Force facility, procurement plans, and India’s strategic collaborations.” The data has been made good by a hacker group and put on sale. How did it come to light? Strangely, the leak was announced by Babuk Locker 2.0, ransomware group on March 10,2025.
Babuk ransomware group is said to have exfiltrated 20 terabytes of data from DRDO systems. It includes classified defence documents and a vast depository of credential logs. As a data sample and to prove that the gang is in possession of the data claimed it has publicly released 753 MB of the data leak sample. To what geography does this group belong to? Athenian Tech released screenshots of their chat with Babuk Locker 2.0, in Indonesian language. They could potentially be from Indonesia. The firm concluded that the ransomware group’s claims about the scale of the breach could be exaggerated. The data leak raises urgent concerns about cyber security vulnerabilities. What efforts do we make to create a cyber safe environment at least of defence and critical infrastructure.
DENIAL OF CYBER SECURITY VULNERABILITIES CANNOT TAKE US A LONG WAY.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.