As the world reels from the onset of the WannaCry ransomware, India’s cyber security division urged the government to patch critical infrastructure. Banks, airport, stock markets and major corporations alike were advised to download the latest patch.
India was one of the world’s first victims of a targeted mass hack. 19 years ago, on June 3, 1998, the home page of India’s premier nuclear plant, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), bore an unauthorised image and message. A mushroom cloud with the words:
If a nuclear war does start, you will be the first to scream …
Five megabytes of emails had been downloaded, containing weeks of correspondence between BARC scientists. The hackers routed their approach through American military servers. They called themselves ‘milw0rm’ and they had begun the era of hacking nuclear facilities.
At the time, it had only been a month since India had conducted a series of nuclear tests at Pokhran. An international team of teenage hackers had broken into the servers of the BARC. Going by the pseudonyms JF, Keystroke, ExtreemUK, savec0re, and VeNoMouS, they had exposed India’s cyber security infrastructure as non-existent.
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