Electronic Clearing System of the Income Tax Department, India hacked: Hacker Diverted around Rs 15 crore

The Electronic Clearing System (ECS) of the Income Tax (I-T) Department has been hacked into, jeopardising the functioning of department across Mumbai. On Wednesday, three days after the incident, the I-T department handed over the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Sources revealed that the ECS of the I-T department, which facilitates tax refunds of Mumbaikars has been hacked into. It is believed, the hacker also managed to divert crores of rupees from the system. Following this incident, the entire system that processes income tax payment has been shut down since Monday. To prevent further damage, the department has now changed the passwords of all the senior officers with access to the ECS.

Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, R K Singh confirmed the report, stating, “The matter has been transferred to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).”

According to I-T sources, the incident came to light last week when an additional commissioner level officer discovered unauthorised remittance made from his section. The officer informed his seniors about it and investigations revealed the ECS had been hacked into.

“It seems that more than Rs 15 crore has been siphoned off from the ECS. Investigations are on to ascertain the total amount,” an officer from the I-T Department said requesting anonymity.

ECS system of the I-T was launched recently to clear the refunds of taxpayers in bulk and cut down the tedious paperwork. Sources said that the department has cleared the refunds of one lakh more assesses in a short span of a month through ECS.

“The remittance was made by computers. Now, to check the source and officer who has cleared the refunds, one has to manually go through the entire process which will take a really long time,” said an assessing officer from the I-T department.

In a parallel inquiry, the investigation wing of the I-T is also on a trail of bogus PAN cardholders. Sources said a businessman from suburban Mumbai had filed an income tax return with the help of bogus PAN card. The I-T official got suspicious and found that the card was made in the name of two boys. I-T officials interrogated the boys who revealed that they never applied for any PAN card.

Further inquiries revealed that their father’s employers had managed the fake PAN cards in the name of boys. The I-T officials then approached the local police, but police refused to register the offence. Inquiries are still on in the matter.

I-T payment system has been shut down since Monday following the incident

China tried to hack India's computers: NSA

Chinese hackers have tried to penetrate computers in the offices of National Security Adviser M K Narayanan, a British paper on Monday quoted him as saying.

Narayanan said his office and other Government departments were targeted on December 15, the same date that US defence, finance and technology companies, including Google, reported cyber attacks from China.

"This was not the first instance of an attempt to hack into our computers," Narayanan told The Times in an interview, adding the would-be hackers sent an e-mail with a PDF attachment containing a Trojan virus.

The virus, which allows hackers to download or delete files, was detected and officials were told not to log on until it was eliminated, Narayanan said.

"People seem to be fairly sure it was the Chinese. It is difficult to find the exact source but this is the main suspicion. It seems well founded," he told The Times, adding that India was cooperating with the US and Britain to bolster its cyber defences.

The Chinese government has denied any role in the attacks, with a foreign ministry spokeswoman saying: "Hacking in whatever form is prohibited by law in China."

Narayanan said that while he expected China to be an increasingly high security priority for India, the main threat still came from militants based in Pakistan.

He said Islamabad had done nothing to dismantle militant groups since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and criticised Britain for accepting its excuse that such groups were beyond its control.

"The British are still blinkered on this. We believe Pakistan's policy of using terror as a policy weapon remains," Narayanan said, adding India is anxious to prevent an attack from Pakistan during the Commonwealth Games in October.

"From Pakistan's point of view, it's important to disrupt the Games so you can claim that India is not a safe place," Narayanan said

Watch out!!!! - Midori is coming

WINDOWS is a name that has ruled the whole computer world since its first launch in November 1985. Since then it is like a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

With many advanced versions of Windows available today such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, it is the most used operating system in the world. In 2010, Microsoft is going to launch WINDOWS 2007, but now here is time to experience a yet another technology of operating systems.

Yes, MICROSOFT is working on a new generation of operating systems called Cloud-Based Operating System and rumors are there that MIDORI will be their first such operating system, which will replace Windows fully from computer map.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE

MIDORI is an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity operating system. In this the tools and libraries are completely managed code. MIDORI is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), will be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.

MIDORI can be also seen as MICROSOFT'S answer those competitors who are applying "Virtualization" as a mean to solving issues within contemporary computing.

The main idea behind MIDORI is to develop a lightweight portable OS which can be mated easily to lots of various applications.

IMPORTANCE OF MIDORI

For knowing the importance of MIDORI you have to think about, how an operating system is loaded on a computer. Actually operating system is loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. In this way, the operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware. As Windows is dependent on hardware, it might face opposition from contemporary ways of working because people are extremely mobile in using different devices in order get diverse information.

Due to this trend installing different applications on a single computer may led to different compatibility issues whenever the machine require updating. The new operating system will solve these problems by the concept of Virtualizing. This will solve problems such as widespread security vulnerabilities, unexpected interactions among different applications, failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers and many more.

Google threatens to leave China

Google has threatened to close its operations and offices in China after hacking of email accounts of many human rights activists.

In a statement on its blog on Tuesday, the world's second biggest corporate said it has detected in December "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.''

The main goal of the attackers was access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, the statement said. But they didn't succeed as "only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves,'' Google said.

But independent of this attack, Google said it has "discovered that the accounts of dozens of US, China and Europe based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.

"These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.''

The Mountain View-based company said it has made "infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google'' and urged users to deploy anti-virus and anti-spy ware programmes. These attacks, Google said, have forced it to "review the feasibility of our business operations in China.''

The company, which had agreed to censor of Google.cn at its launch in 2006, said it was "no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.''

Google said it will soon hold discussions the Chinese soon whether it can operate an unfiltered search engine. "We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,'' the blog warned.