Sub-continent in Web war.

Another bloody chapter was written in history of the sub-continent earlier in the year, when more than 1000 solders from Pakistan and India died fighting an undeclared war in the mountains of Kashmir. Finally, after a meeting between President Clinton and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Washington in July, all troops were withdrawn. At the same time they have been fighting a war over information, with several Internet resources hacked in both countries. With some of the best software skills in the world, the fighting over the Internet is just as ferocious as in the snow-capped mountains of Kashmir. Several top Indian and Pakistani computer professionals in America and Europe are "helping" their respective governments by supplying information on the best way to harm the enemy_s computer systems. In October last year, anyone logging on to the Indian army website www.armyinkashmir.org found themselves viewing the contents of a Pakistani Government website which gave an anti-Indian slant on the Kashmir issue. The Indian Government traced this hacking to a Pakistan-based information services firm. The hackers, using the handles of Gharib Hanif and Munda Pakistani, successfully managed to divert all logins to the Indian site to their own in Pakistan for two days. More recently, while battles raged in the mountains in Kashmir in May, there was another attack on www.armyinkashmir.org. With about 200 e-mails of support and financial help being received daily by the Indian Government at this Web address, the mail component of the website was tampered with. All pro-Indian e-mail was diverted to a different address. The Indian armed forces, using some of the best computer professionals in the country, quickly recovered from the hack attack.The Indian Government, in turn, cut off all network access on 25 June this year to the website of the respected Pakistan newspaper Dawn at www.dawn.com. Nobody from India could get access to the Dawn website for more than a fortnight. Several Indian national newspapers campaigned for the restoration of Internet access to Dawn, a newspaper seen as a powerful voice for democracy and moderation in Pakistan. In the past year, most of the government sites in these two countries, including the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre where India_s atomic technology was developed, have been attacked.