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Sensitive Data of Indian Navy’s Scorpene Class Submarines Leaked

@PARIKRAMA
So,It means the data leaked is General to All Previous Scorpene-Class Submarines.The extent of modification done for Indian variant will differentiate form standard Scorpene Submarine.
Also. as you mentioned the manuals in leak contained Indian navy insignia was leaked before ordering of components was Indian Navy then
  • It may be made for indian navy as most of operational procedure remained in line with previous variants/class standard so didn't require that much changes.
  • Documents are forged with indian Navy insignia to gain more Media attention and is part of Economic Warfare against DCNS for Collins Class Replacement.
What you think?

>>Do you really believe in all 22000+ pages of Docs contains information only about Manuals and other standard characteristics..
Well if all data is leaked (Single breach) in 2011 then we should assume that damage to our interests will be minimal?

Other Analysis explaining extent of damage,You will find amusing
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...n-scorpene-data-leak/articleshow/53850856.cms
 
Enjoy the next part

It’s in the mail: how submarine secrets surfaced in Australia
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Secrets surfaced

In late April 2013 a Sydney postman reached into his satchel and pulled out a small envelope containing the secrets of India’s new submarine fleet.

He dropped the letter, with a Singapore stamp on it, in a private post office box and moved on.

The envelope, containing a small data disc, remained there for days, along with a Telstra bill and junk mail, before being picked up on April 24, 2013, by a man who took it home and pushed the disk into his computer.

This week the contents of that disk have become front-page news in Australia, India and France as each country grapples with the ramifications of an Edward Snowden-style leak of confidential documents disclosing the entire secret combat capability of India’s new Scorpene-class submarine fleet.


The leak is of more than passing interest to Australia because the documents come from the same French shipbuilder, DCNS, that will design 12 submarines for the Royal Australian Navy in the country’s largest and most expensive defence project.

But it is of far greater urgency to India, which fears that if a foreign spy service has acquired the data its six Scorpene submarines, costing a total of $US3 billion ($3.93bn), could be dead in the water before they sail. France is also in damage control as it tries to understand and explain how 22,400 of its secret documents on India’s submarines crossed the world to be delivered by a Sydney postie.

None of these three countries was aware of the leak until this week, when The Australian asked DCNS Australia on Monday afternoon to comment on an astonishing data file it had seen, marked “Restricted Scorpene India”, which laid bare almost every secret capability of India’s new submarines. These included the contracted parameters and capabilities of the submarine’s stealth features, its noise signatures at different speeds, its range, endurance, diving depths, magnetic and infra-red data. In other words, the full suite of submarine capability spread over 22,400 documents that any navy would consider to be classified and highly sensitive.

The news set off a remarkable chain of events, which says much about the high stakes involved for each country. On receiving questions about the leak from The Australian on Monday, the Canberra office of France’s DCNS immediately deferred to its head office in Paris.

The ramifications of a news story revealing the mega-data dump on such a sensitive project were immediately obvious. India would be furious, but so too would Malaysia, Chile and Brazil, which also have, or will soon have, DCNS Scorpene submarines. And Australia was also likely to be concerned about the security of its own new partnership with the French defence giant.

DCNS officials in Paris urgently checked their files, looking for signs of espionage.


On Tuesday morning, DCNS officials in Paris came back to their Canberra DCNS colleagues with the news that they could find no immediate evidence of a security breach that would explain such a massive data leak.

The DCNS team in Canberra met to workshop the problem. It was a sobering moment for them. The tight-knit group led by Sean Costello, former chief of staff to former defence minister David Johnston, were considered heroes by DCNS in Paris for pulling off an unlikely victory against the more heavily favoured Germans and Japanese to win the lucrative contract to design Australia’s future submarines. The leak was not their fault, but they would be saddled with its legacy, which would be that their commercial rivals would exploit every opportunity to say the French can never be trusted with Australia’s secrets.

The group reasoned that the most likely scenario was that a commercial competitor was seeking to sabotage the company and had somehow obtained and then leaked the data. The obvious suspects were the losers in the submarine bid, Germany and Japan, but why would they wait for four months after the decision to strike?


If the leak was a global attack on DCNS then Norway, rather than Australia, would have been the obvious place to strike given that DCNS is now trying to pitch its Scorpene submarine to the Norwegian Navy, whereas the Australian deal was already stitched up.

DCNS had no answers and so it was assumed the most likely source of the leak was from the Indian side. The company wrote a carefully worded statement that implied — but did not state — that the leak came from India.

By late Tuesday afternoon DCNS realised it had to tell the Australian government that some very bad news was to be published the next day. The company called the head of Defence’s Future Submarine Project, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, who then called Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson. Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne was also briefed.

In New Delhi, India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was asleep when an aide woke him at midnight and showed him the report on The Australian’s website.


For Parrikar the news was devastating. He had a strong personal investment in India’s Scorpene submarines. Just over a year earlier, on April 6, 2015, he had watched the “undocking” ceremony in Mumbai as the first of India’s six Scorpene submarines, Kalvari, meaning Tiger Shark, was celebrated. The new submarine, decked in garlands and Indian flags, represented the pinnacle of the Indian Navy. A prayer ceremony was held to bless the boat.

The Scorpenes were a badly needed replacement for India’s ageing fleet of Russian Kilo-class and German Type 209 submarines that were almost three decades old and often confined to port with technical problems.

The DCNS Scorpene, however, was ordered in 2005 to spearhead India’s submarine fleet because, it boasted, in the words of the Indian Express: “Stealth features (which) give it invulnerability, unmatched by many submarines.”

But as Parrikar woke, the invulnerability of his pet project was in doubt. He ordered his chief of navy to launch an urgent investigation into the leak and what damage it had potentially caused.

At 6.30am in Australia, Pyne had read The Australian’s report and was soon on the phone to Richardson to discuss how to respond.

Sources say Richardson was of the view that Australia’s own security arrangements surrounding the new submarine project were already robust and there was no need to reinvent the wheel on security just because of the leak.

Pyne agreed, but also wanted to give a gentle message to the French. He asked Richardson to convey “a reminder” to DCNS that Australia expects the security of classified information on the future submarine project to be as tight as Australia’s handling of security information with its closest ally, the US. The subtext was, this is serious, don’t let this happen again.

But Pyne also knew the story would run strongly in Australia unless he tried to kill it quickly, so at about 8.30am he issued a press release claiming — without having access to the 22,400 leaked documents — that Defence had advised that the leak would have “no bearing” on Australia’s submarine program.


It was a public statement at odds with his private instruction to Richardson, but in Pyne’s view the quicker he could wash Australia’s hands of what he knew would be a nasty international furore the better.

India woke on Wednesday to the report that its submarine fleet had been potentially compromised by the leak of thousands of secret documents. Within hours it was the biggest story in the country. Under pressure to provide a quick answer, Parrikar said the leak appeared to be a case of hacking but he offered nothing to support this theory, which he later backed away from.

In Paris, DCNS realised it had a public relations and security disaster on its hands, with the story being reported on the front page of the newspaper Le Monde, followed the next day by a front-page cartoon lampooning the French security services.

DCNS backed away from the claim that India had caused the leak and the French government stepped in to announce that its defence security officials would investigate.

The Indian government also announced an investigation, but with every major Indian newspaper reporting the story on its front page, the government urged patience until its navy could assess the leak and the damage caused.


But it seems that the story behind this leak may be more incompetence than espionage — more Austin Powers than James Bond. The Weekend Australian has been told by sources that the data was removed from DCNS in Paris in 2011 by a former French Navy officer who quit the service in the early 1970s and worked for French defence companies for more than 30 years before becoming a subcontractor to DCNS.

Sources say they believe this subcontractor somehow copied the sensitive data from DCNS in France and, along with a French colleague, took it to a Southeast Asian country. If so, he broke the law and may face prosecution.

The two men worked in that Southeast Asian country carrying out unclassified naval defence work.

The speculation is that the data on the Scorpene was removed to serve as a reference guide for the former naval officer’s new job, but it is unclear why anyone would risk breaking the law by taking classified data for such a purpose.

The two men are then said to have the fallen out with their employer, a private company run by a Western businessman. They were sacked and refused re-entry to their building. At least one of the men asked to retrieve the data on the Scorpene but they were refused and the company — possibly not knowing the significance of the data — held on to it.

The secret data was then sent to the company’s head office in Singapore, where the company’s IT chief — again probably not knowing its significance — tried to load it on an internet server for the person in Sydney who was slated to replace the two sacked French workers.

The data was placed on a server on April 18, 2013, and it was then that it was dangerously vulnerable to hacking or interception by a foreign intelligence service. It is not known whether the data stayed on this server for a few days or for a year. It is not known if any foreign intelligence service obtained it during this time.

Unable to send such a large file over the net and not knowing the significance of the data, the Singapore company sent it on a data disk by regular post to Sydney.

When the recipient, who was experienced in defence issues, opened the file on his home computer he was stunned. He was expecting to read notes on a low-level naval program, but before him lay the secret capabilities of the new Indian submarine fleet.

The data was not encrypted so he transferred it to an encrypted disk. That evening the man wiped the old disk with special software, grabbed a hammer and smashed it to pieces in his backyard.

He placed the new encrypted disk in a locked filing cabinet in his office and there it remained for more than two years.


In the back room of Cafe Loco, in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick, the man arrives, sits down and pulls out a data disk from his pocket. He orders a hamburger then slips the disk into his laptop. He says he has something to show me, but not give to me.

Why are you doing this I ask?

He replies: “In the wake of the recent future submarine decision (in Australia) this matter went from one of a very serious breach for both France and India to a matter of national security significance to Australia and the US.”

In other words, he wants Australia to know that its future submarine partner, France, has already lost control of secret data on India’s new submarines. His hope is that this will spur the Turnbull government and DCNS to step up security to ensure Australia’s $50 billion submarine project does not suffer the same fate.

He says he is a whistleblower and maintains that revealing to the world, via The Australian, that this classified data exists in a dangerously uncontrolled form is worthwhile because it will serve Australia’s interests even if it causes an international furore.

He presses a button on his computer and his screen flickers to life.

Here in a Melbourne cafe, amid the clatter of plates, laughter and the smell of coffee, he scrolls through the secrets of India’s submarine fleet. He has not broken any laws and the authorities know who he is. He plans to surrender the disk to the government on Monday.

Source:http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...bb358581cf27819acfb+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in
Nice article, almost copied from some Ian fleming spy novel...
The dot connections are very dubious; why in all of the world it had to end up in Australia who just happened to be on the point of sealing its own contract with DCNS? and this timing!?
The article says clearly that the most beneficiary of the leak is the Australian security apparatus with The US one to some extent..
Maybe there is a message behind it for India especially concerning the hegemony in the Indian Ocean.. Stealth is a big concern in these matters, and the Aussies won't be in favor of anyone spying on them without detection, They "prefer" instead to spy on others without being detected.. maybe and just maybe, that is why they are getting stealth french subs from France too with main components from the US..
IMHO the Scorpene Subs must be very efficient and very special to get all this attention at a crucial moment for many countries trying to procure them..DCNS won't suffer much from this , since Australia just asked it to strengthen its security concerning the Aussie deal..India on the other hand has to accept the facts at least for the subs under construction.. and maybe France will lose a few billion dollars in other deals with India, but they don't come anywhere close to the 38 billion US$ of the Aussie Submarine deal plus and I repeat plus the ToT to France from the US most sophisticated submarine systems..So as much as India longs for ToT France also longs for some tech that is better than its own or that will give it an advantage in building its future Submarines..
 
humm, question is how royally india get screwed? And what is indian response to mitigate perceived risk? Besides, india claim to be supa powa, do you need DCN to build sub?
 
Oh, if it is an Indian source, the gentle(wo)man has been taken in for a 'debrief'. Our counter intelligence is pretty good, usually.

it may have been one in a million things, from a deliberate leak to some disgruntle employee or even foreign espionage, I am not familiar with Indian Intelligence, so I cannot say for sure what it is or how the Indian or French or whoever trying to be deal with the aftermath.

I am just saying leak on any level is a common occurrence, even if you are talking about organisation like CIA/NSA, you don't need to go far, just see how Snowden turns head with NSA?

I am not saying this is not serious, but I think you guys have inflated the seriousness in this situation :)
 
Just a curious question, going by your logic. If someone takes your nude pic and another guy publish it on the newspaper. You will thank the newspaper guy for letting you and everyone know that your picture was taken? Don't take me wrong, just confused by your logic.

Good Day to you!

Good point, which is why I used the term "only" in reference to the point being raised.
........and promptly deciding to focus all his ire only on the publisher ....
I agree that a certain level of irritation would be directed at the publisher but the person trusted (continuing your analogy, maybe the partner) who leaked it would be the primary target of anger. The publisher is responsible for the embarrassment suffered but it is someone else who is the cause.

I know of a certain operation which never took place officially. Can I go and shout out without being booked under Official Secrets Act of 1923 as amended time to time?.

Only if you are the citizen of the country in question & even then only if you were entrusted with and mishandled classified information.

Newspaper & media outlets do make such calls when it comes to their own country but few are prosecutable cases. Secrets of other countries do not apply and cannot be protected under the act you mention or similar.

Also, being a friendly power, Australia will have to investigate the matter and inform accordingly. None of my concern if they impale him, I need my assets secured. That is all

Friendly power or not, Australia cannot touch him on legal grounds. Simply a no-go area.
 
it may have been one in a million things, from a deliberate leak to some disgruntle employee or even foreign espionage, I am not familiar with Indian Intelligence, so I cannot say for sure what it is or how the Indian or French or whoever trying to be deal with the aftermath.

That is why my previous speculative post, I am aware.

I am just saying leak on any level is a common occurrence, even if you are talking about organisation like CIA/NSA, you don't need to go far, just see how Snowden turns head with NSA?

Totally, agreed. Trying to make sceptics understand the thing. And basically, wasting bandwidth and time.

I am not saying this is not serious, but I think you guys have inflated the seriousness in this situation :)

Totally agreed. Much ado about nothing here. That is what @PARIKRAMA is posting about. We agree there is very less likelihood of anything cirtical becoming public.
 
That is why my previous speculative post, I am aware.



Totally, agreed. Trying to make sceptics understand the thing. And basically, wasting bandwidth and time.



Totally agreed. Much ado about nothing here. That is what @PARIKRAMA is posting about. We agree there is very less likelihood of anything cirtical becoming public.

Whatever may be the truth, BJP government would be accused of a cover-up.

If the incumbent GoI is smart they would cancel the program and go for a new platform.

Luckily not many of these have been built.
 


The key grouse here must be about DCNS not informing GoI about the leak/theft in 2011 Since there had just been extensive discussions on price escalation just before that, maybe DCNS were worried that Antony might just decide to cancel the whole project if the matter of the leak had been known. Be that as it may, this matter is now exposed & DCNS must be made to make good for the resultant headache.

Whatever may be the truth, BJP government would be accused of a cover-up.

That risk exists but it is not a major one since no internal corruption is made out.

If the incumbent GoI is smart they would cancel the program and go for a new platform.

Much as i dislike DCNS's attitude, I'm not sure that this a sensible way to go about things. Far better to squeeze something more from them.
 

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