India among top targets of spying by NSA

...In the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days....

...... SIGINT (signal intelligence) system collects electronic surveillance program records or internet data (DNI) and telephone call metadata records (DNR), which is all stored in an NSA archive called GM-PLACE.....

.....Three “global heat maps,” which give each country a colour code based on how extensively it was subjected to NSA surveillance, clearly show that India was one of the hottest targets for U.S. intelligence.....

 ....the top-secret documents obtained by The Hindu show that this internal NSA tool focusses on counting and categorising the telephone calls and Internet records as well as on storing and retrieving...

 ........“By accessing metadata, you can learn an awful lot about an individual. With mobile phones, location data has now been added to metadata. With the Internet, you can in addition understand someone’s location in a social network in much more detail, as well as understand how that network relates to other networks......

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Indian Govt May Ban U.S. Based E-mail Services For Official Communication

....Wary of cyber snooping, the government may ban use of e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo for official communications so as to safeguard its critical data....

....The Department of Electronics and Information Technology is drafting a policy on e-mail usage in government offices and departments, which will be released in two months.....

.....The government will send a formal notification after the policy is implemented in about two months covering about 5-6 lakh Central and State government employees to use the email service provided by National Informatics Centre (NIC).....

....The development comes close on heels of concerns being raised by a section in the government, especially intelligence agencies, over use of email services, provided by foreign firms (mostly US-based), which have their servers located in overseas locations, making it difficult to track if sensitive government data is being snooped upon....


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India- The New Talent Hotspot For Cyber Criminals

......India is emerging as talent hotspot for black-hat hackers, thanks to slow hiring in the software industry, easy money, and lack of proper law enforcements......

.....Global cyber crime groups are outsourcing the jobs of hacking and creating malwares to India through cyber-mercenaries, who work underground.....

....."Increasingly, India is becoming not just the victim but the host country with regard to cyber attacks," said Jagdish Mahapatra, MD for India and SAARC at McAfee, the antivirus company....

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