India said on Thursday that it sees no immediate security risk from the leak to an Australian newspaper of secret documents detailing the capability of a French-designed submarine being built for its navy.
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The Indian Navy, in a statement issued shortly after the minister spoke, stressed the leak did not happen in India.
Mr Nicholls said the leak of sensitive information about India’s DCNS-designed Scorpene submarines was a serious matter.
Also, the GoI is examining impact if info contained in documents claimed to be available with Australian sources is compromised.
Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was quoted by media sources as saying: “I understand there has been a case of hacking. The first step is to identify, the second step is to identify the extent of the unwarranted, but it is not all 100 percent because we do have our final integration”, Parrikar said. “So we will find out all this”, Parrikar told reporters.
The Australian said DCNS implied that the leak may have come from India rather than France. The first of the Scorpene class submarines being built in India, the INS Kalvari, took part in sea trials in May and is expected to be inducted soon in the Indian Navy. The report says the information was suspected to have been taken in 2011 by a French former DCNS sub-contractor.
“I have asked the Naval Chief to conduct a full analysis of the incident as to what is the leak and what has been leaked about us”.
“The French company that won the bid to design Australia’s new $50 billion submarine fleet has suffered a massive leak of secret documents, raising fears about the future security of top-secret data on the navy’s future fleet”.
The documents include thousands of pages on the submarine sensors and thousands more on its communication and navigation systems as well as almost 500 pages on the torpedo launch system alone. The data leak has revealed the detailed information about the combat capability of the Scorpene submarines being built in India.
The Australian said that the leak will also cause alarm at the highest level in countries that operate a variant of the Scorpene, or have ordered the submarine, including Brazil, Chile and Malaysia.
India is now building six Scorpene-class submarines in partnership with DCNS.
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Although the 22,000-page cache of documents date from 2011, they give very detailed technical information about the combat capability of the Scorpene vessels, which are now in use in Malaysia and Chile.
