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S RAMA KRISHNA NEW DELHI | 18th Mar
The Indian Navy has banned its personnel from accepting pen-drives and external hard discs as gifts from arms manufacturers and has disabled all USB ports in its official computers. Security breach has been cited as the reason behind the move. The naval headquarters has sent a letter to this effect to all naval formations.
During presentations and defence exhibitions, arms manufacturing companies generally give pen drives containing brochures of the companies and their products to save space. The pen drive or the external hard disc has inbuilt software to detect information using key-word search when plugged to a computer's USB port. The accessed information can be seen by the source server of the arms manufacturer or the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), who may have gifted the device, when the Navy computer is logged onto the internet. Thus, there is always a possibility that classified information about naval formations may get leaked.
A Navy officer told this newspaper that as a computer has three USB ports on an average, a huge number of USB ports have had to be disabled.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Army do not allow the use of pen drives on official computers. An IAF official told this newspaper that pen drives can be used on certain stand-alone computers after taking permission, according to an existing IT rule followed by the service.
It may be noted that in the naval war-room leak case in 2005, two pen drives were used to smuggle out around 7,000 pages from the naval operations room. The case was referred to the CBI for investigation, in which former Navy chief Arun Prakash's relative Shankaran was named.
The move to ban pen drive comes in the wake of recent developments like four technical officers in the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command possessing classified professional information on their personal computers. The officers, who are facing a Board of Inquiry, have also been accused of making public classified information through social networking sites such as Facebook. Two of these four officers are likely to be dismissed from service soon.
It may be noted that in June 2011 the Navy directed its officers to either delete their social networking accounts or minimise the information about and photographs of their locations they put up on these sites. The matter came to light when officers, particularly those in Russia or sailing there on overseas deployment, uploaded on these sites information about ships and submarines they were posted in.
Earlier, the Indian Army too asked its personnel to refrain from giving out too much information on social networking sites. It was found that officers were giving out their locations, phone numbers and weapons on their profile pages and through photographs and status updates.
www.sunday-guardian.com/news/navy-bans-pen-drives-as-gifts
The Indian Navy has banned its personnel from accepting pen-drives and external hard discs as gifts from arms manufacturers and has disabled all USB ports in its official computers. Security breach has been cited as the reason behind the move. The naval headquarters has sent a letter to this effect to all naval formations.
During presentations and defence exhibitions, arms manufacturing companies generally give pen drives containing brochures of the companies and their products to save space. The pen drive or the external hard disc has inbuilt software to detect information using key-word search when plugged to a computer's USB port. The accessed information can be seen by the source server of the arms manufacturer or the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), who may have gifted the device, when the Navy computer is logged onto the internet. Thus, there is always a possibility that classified information about naval formations may get leaked.
A Navy officer told this newspaper that as a computer has three USB ports on an average, a huge number of USB ports have had to be disabled.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Army do not allow the use of pen drives on official computers. An IAF official told this newspaper that pen drives can be used on certain stand-alone computers after taking permission, according to an existing IT rule followed by the service.
It may be noted that in the naval war-room leak case in 2005, two pen drives were used to smuggle out around 7,000 pages from the naval operations room. The case was referred to the CBI for investigation, in which former Navy chief Arun Prakash's relative Shankaran was named.
The move to ban pen drive comes in the wake of recent developments like four technical officers in the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command possessing classified professional information on their personal computers. The officers, who are facing a Board of Inquiry, have also been accused of making public classified information through social networking sites such as Facebook. Two of these four officers are likely to be dismissed from service soon.
It may be noted that in June 2011 the Navy directed its officers to either delete their social networking accounts or minimise the information about and photographs of their locations they put up on these sites. The matter came to light when officers, particularly those in Russia or sailing there on overseas deployment, uploaded on these sites information about ships and submarines they were posted in.
Earlier, the Indian Army too asked its personnel to refrain from giving out too much information on social networking sites. It was found that officers were giving out their locations, phone numbers and weapons on their profile pages and through photographs and status updates.
www.sunday-guardian.com/news/navy-bans-pen-drives-as-gifts