Twitter hacks: Pak prez, flag pics posted on India's UN envoy account

New Delhi: In what can only be a case of hacking, two photographs of Pakistan's flag and the neighbouring country's President Mamnoon Hussain were posted from the Twitter account of India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Syed Akbaruddin.

The pictures were posted during the late hours of Sunday, and interestingly, the "blue tick" that marks a verified account also disappeared at the time.

The account was later restored along with the blue tick and the questionable tweets were also removed.

Evidently, cyber attack has not been a new strategy for the terrorists in Pakistan, and government officials have been prime targets.

In 2016, a total of 199 government websites were hacked in India, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had told the Parliament.

In fact, more than 700 websites under the Indian government have been hacked from 2013 to 2016.

In January, 2017, the website of the National Security Guard (NSG), the Indian special forces unit combating terror activities, was also hacked posing unprecedented threat to national security.

The website was, however, blocked immediately by the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.IN).

As technology has progressed, so has the strategy of terror attacks and cyber warfare taken over the battlefield to breach national security.

Addressing the press on Saturday, Army Chief Bipin Rawat also focused on the increasing threat of cyber and information warfare, adding that the Indian security forces are concentrating more in that area.

Cyber warfare is a phenomenon plaguing countries across the world too. Although the culprits of cyber attacks are practically impossible to nab, the source has often been traced to Russia.

In 2017, more than 300 Ukrainian companies were penetrated by hackers speculated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be from Russia, in an attempt to cripple the financial system of the country.

Czech Republic too fell victim to a massive cyber attack, wherein emails of dozens of its most senior diplomats were hacked. Russian hackers were again thought to be behind it.

Recently, Russian hackers are laying blueprint to hack the internal email system of the United States Senate, a report by a cyber security firm has suggested.