Times:

Chinese hackers are believed to have attempted to penetrate India’s most sensitive government office in the latest sign of rising tensions between the two rival Asian powers, The Times has learnt.

M. K. Narayanan, India’s National Security Adviser, said his office and other government departments were targeted on December 15, the same date that US companies reported cyber attacks from China.

“This was not the first instance of an attempt to hack into our computers,” Mr Narayanan told The Times in a rare interview.

He said that the attack came in the form of an e-mail with a PDF attachment containing a “Trojan” virus, which allows a hacker to access a computer remotely and download or delete files. The virus was detected and officials were told not to log on until it was eliminated, he said.

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China has denied any role in the hacking attacks, which began on December 15 and also targeted US defence contractors and finance and technology companies, including Google. “Hacking in whatever form is prohibited by law in China,” said Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

Nevertheless, the incident is likely to place further strain on India’s relations with the Chinese, who humiliated the Indian Army in a brief war over their Himalayan border in 1962. Relations had been thawing over the past decade but took a sudden turn for the worse last year, when the dispute flared again, prompting India to deploy two more army divisions and fighter jets on its eastern border.

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Someone in China is a very aggressive hacker and the government is unable or unwilling to stop it. Perhaps that is because the government is behind the hacking. While it proclaims its innocence, it has not prosecuted anyone for hacking that I am aware of.