India hit by sub data leak

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 24

India’s bid to shore up its naval capabilities and have the tactical edge over rivals has taken a hit with around 22,400 pages of technical data relating to six Scorpene-class submarines having been leaked, compromising abilities of the underwater vessels. The subs are being built for the Navy in collaboration with a French company.

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New Delhi launched an internal probe that commenced early today — soon after The Australian, a newspaper based out of Sydney, reported about the leaked data and its details. The paper termed it a “stunning leak”, saying “it details the entire secret combat capability of the six Scorpene-class submarines of India”.

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The Ministry of Defence asked the Indian Navy to send a formal letter to French submarine-maker DCNS asking about the leaked documents. The French Government owns about 62 per cent stake in DCNS, which is building six of the diesel-electric Scorpene-class submarines in Mumbai at a cost of Rs 23,562 crore ($3.46 billion). The first one — INS Kalvari — is set to be inducted into the naval fleet at the end of the year and the remaining five vessels at periodic intervals till the year 2020. The Indian Navy is confident that no operational data has been compromised.

Sources said the hull of the submarine cannot change, its insides and noise   reducing feature make the difference. Also since the vessels have not been made operational, the actual noise signatures — used by enemy submarine-hunting vessels to track undersea vessels — are not known. A spokesperson for the DCNS released a statement in Paris saying: “This serious matter is thoroughly being investigated by French national authorities for Defence Security. Probe will determine the exact nature of the leaked papers, potential damages to DCNS customers as well as the responsibilities for this leak.”

International news agencies quoted the DCNS spokesperson as saying “corporate espionage” could be behind the leak.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said: “The first step is to identify what all is related to us. Anyway it’s not that 100 per cent data has been leaked,” adding it appeared to be a case of “hacking”. An Indian Navy official statement said: “It appears that the source of leak is from overseas and not in India.”

The Navy asked its specialists, including those working on cyber security, to report for work at 4 am today as they examined the files shown by the newspaper. They reportedly told the MoD the documents did not match with those supplied by the DCNS to India.

The newspaper, which claimed to have seen the data, said leaked documents were marked “Restricted Scorpene India”. These detail most sensitive combat capabilities of India’s new submarine fleet and would provide an intelligence bonanza if obtained by India’s strategic rivals, such as Pakistan or China, it said.

The data lists out the frequencies at which the submarines gather intelligence and the levels of noise the subs make at various speeds, the news report said. It also contains information on the submarine’s diving depths, range, and endurance, besides its magnetic, electromagnetic, and infrared data.

The news report claimed the data was most probably leaked not from India but from the DCNS in France as it also includes separate confidential DCNS files on plans to sell French frigates to Chile and the French sale of the Mistral-class amphibious assault ship carrier to Russia.

Since these projects of the DCNS have no link to India, there is high probability that the data files were removed from the company in France.

The DCNS is also to make 12 similar vessels for Australia, a $38 billion contract it won beating stiff completion from Japanese and German submarine-makers. The contract was signed in April this year.