New Delhi: Panic gripped Indian army officers over the last week after they were unable to access salary details on the Principal Comptroller of Defence Accounts (Officers) website which was allegedly hacked late last month.
All vital and sensitive data related to officers’ service and financial details are feared to have been stolen by suspected Pakistani or Chinese hackers.
 What most officers of all ranks are deeply aggrieved about is that while PCDAO and army brass as well the defence ministry is aware of the hacking, no measures had been taken to restore the website.
“It speaks of the lackadaisical attitude of the authorities. There is no urgency on the part of the government to plug the massive hole and retrieve the data,” said a disgruntled officer with the Southern Command venting his discontent at PCDAO authorities.
MoD and the Army have started investigation into the hacking, but the issue has been kept under wraps for fear of an uproar among officers some of whom apprehend that key components of their salary – provident fund or travel allowance/dearness allowance –might have been swept clean by the online miscreants.
“We have no clue what might have happened to our salary because we are not being able to access our salary slips. The hackers have hit where it hurts the officer corps the most,” said a major general who did not wish to be identified.
Indeed, the PCDAO website is central to an officer’s finances. He or she can not only access information on the salary, but also audit and details on allowances, including leave travel allowance, receipt of claims, proof of IT returns. Officers also apply for PF withdrawals through the website.
Officers’ individual accounts which can be accessed through a username and password carry other details such as their exact areas of posting, the units they belong to, PAN card numbers and bank account details among other things.
Many officers claimed these constitute sensitive information that foreign agencies might be interested in getting hold of. Preliminary investigations revealed that all data of officers across regiments have been “stolen from the Mumbai server through a remote login port.”
The defence establishment initially put up on the PCDAO website that it would “resume shortly”, saying “salary upload is in progress”. Subsequently, the website shut down completely. When approached for a comment, a defence spokesperson claimed he had no information that the PCDAO website had been hacked.
A PCDAO spokesperson, when contacted, admitted that several officers, alarmed by the disruption, have been approaching officers in Pune to make inquiries why they were not being able to access their salary details. The spokesperson, however, claimed that the website had crashed because of “modification of the computer system” which caused an erroneous transfer of data.