Share

India says submarine document leak ‘a case of hacking’

The Indian Navy said on Wednesday that it was analysing the leak and affirmed that the source of leak was from overseas and not in India. He, calling it a case of hacking, said the first step was to identify if it is related to us.

Advertisement

DCNS is also under contract to build 12 new submarines for Australia at a cost of $39 billion.

Paris: Documents relating to Indian submarines were stolen from French naval contractor DCNS and not leaked, people familiar with the matter said in French government said on Thursday, adding that the information published so far showed only operational aspects of the submarines.

Indian Minister of Defense Manohar Parrikar ordered a probe into the newspaper report, saying the documents could have been obtained through hacking.

In a statement regarding the leak, the Indian Navy said that “the available information is being examined at the headquarters”.

“In the case of Australia, and unlike India, DCNS is both the provider and in-country controller of technical data for the full chain of transmission and usage over the life of the submarines”.

Sensitive data related to India’s Scorpene submarines has been leaked, with French shipbuilder DCNS, which designed the submarine facing a leak of documents spreading over 22,000 pages, a report in Australian media revealed Tuesday.

The daily reported that the stolen data was thought to have been acquired in France in 2011 by a former French navy officer who was a subcontractor for DCNS at the time.

Peter Roberts of the Royal United Services Institute in London said the most serious implications from the leak were the “frequency signature details” associated with the Scorpene.

The six submarines are now under construction in a Naval shipyard in Mumbai, with the first set to go into service by the end of 2016. India has forked over as much as $3.45 billion to French defence for designing the Scorpene exclusive for India.

DCNS told AFP it was aware of the articles and said “national security authorities” had launched an inquiry into the matter.

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.

Advertisement

First reported in The Australian, the documents offer details on the designs of the submarines, which were put together by French company DCNS.

French submarine maker hit by secret data leak: report