On Jan. 9th, 2012, Mark Hosenball reported for Reuters on a new investigation into hacking by the Indian government. According to the article, hackers from an Indian government spy unit "hacked into emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors economic and security relations between the US and China."
This all came to light when another hacker group posted an Indian government memo which discussed hacking the commission. It gets better. That memo said that the Indian government cut a deal with Research in Motion, Nokia, and Apple: give us a back-door into mobile phones, and we'll give you an Indian market presence. The Indian government apparently used those back-doors to spy on the commission.
The Reuters article can be found here.
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On Jan. 9th, 2012, Robert Cringely wrote for InfoWorld on the news of the US-China commission hacking. The article introduced the hacker group responsible for leaking the Indian document: the Lords of Dharmaraja. Apparently the Lords of Dharmaraja were also behind the recent theft of Symantec's source code.
The article ends with a series of chilling questions regarding the relationship between the Indian government and smartphone makers:
"What other smartphone makers provide back-door access to governments? What other U.S. agencies have been spied on? What other information has been leaked? What other governments have a backdoor into our smartphones?"
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