A new report from a Beijing-based cybersecurity firm said hackers linked with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) were found to have inserted “covert backdoors” that may have given them access to sensitive information in dozens of countries, including India, Russia, China and Japan.
Among the reportedly compromised websites listed in the report were those linked to one of India’s top microbial research labs —the Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTech) under the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research — as well as the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bengaluru. Websites linked to the Banaras Hindu University were also listed as being hacked into.
The Beijing-based cybersecurity firm Pangu Lab released a technical report explaining how it had found the backdoors and linked it to “unique identifiers in the operating manuals of the NSA” that had come to light in the 2013 leak of NSA files by insiders.
