call him and tell him you're going to invade

Indian Russell Brand-alike makes prank call, almost starts major war.

A hoax telephone call almost sparked another war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan at the height of last month's terror attacks on Mumbai, officials and Western diplomats on both sides of the border said today.

Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani President, took a telephone call from a man pretending to be Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, on Friday, November 28, apparently without following the usual verification procedures, they said. The hoax caller threatened to take military action against Pakistan in response to the then ongoing Mumbai attacks, which India has since blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), they said.

Mr Zardari responded by placing Pakistan's air force on high alert and telephoning Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, to ask her to intervene.

Via. Pakistan is now claiming that verification procedures were followed, which may imply that an actual telephone conversation between the two got badly out of hand. Things must be pretty bad getting the two sides talking actually promotes conflict.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

Or that someone with the requisite technical skill hacked the telephone switch that routed the call so that it appeared to come from the Indian Foreign Ministry.

Anyone seen Kevin Mitnick lately?

It looks to me like a concerted effort to provoke war between these two states. We'll see a lot more of this kind of information warfare in the coming years.

The hacker also called Condoleezza Rice but failed to get through her staff's checks.

[Alex]

You don't need a Mitnick; you could do it with a suitably negligent VoIP bulk peer and an Asterisk box.

[nobleagl]

Is this for real?

[Alex]

Yes; adjust your delusions accordingly.

[Chris Williams]

A whole new vista of cyberterrorism, which makes a DDOS 'attack' look about as effective as a mean sneer, has just opened itself up to me. fuckfuckfuck. _This_ might have been the attack itself, with Mumbai just the bait.

Write your own Ems Telegram.

In a rational world, the arms control wonks of the planet would team up to offer secure and trusted communications infrastucture to all UN-recognised states - _especially_ the slightly mad, faily, ones. In a slightly luckier world, Arthur C Clarke would have survived to provide a video cameo at the launch press conference.

[Chris Williams]

PS - Never mind _The Day of the Jackal_ - what if their favorite novel is _Red Harvest_, their favorite movie _A Fistful of Dollars_, and their favorite memoir _Popski's Private Army_?

[ajay]

You're going to have to unpack that a bit for us, Chris. I for one haven't read "Red Harvest".

[Fellow Traveller]

I get it: third party manipulates two rival gangs into destroying one another, right?

Red Harvest ---> Yojimbo ---> A Fistful of Dollars

[Chris Williams]

Bingo.

[ajay]

Ah, got you. Thanks.

[Alex]

We already have one of those, Chris, and it was invented by a bunch of profs at MIT and random hackers. PGP; your e-mail client probably does it. To be specific, even without encrypting a document, you can sign it cryptographically, which proves to anyone with your public key that a) you signed it and b) the text is identical to the one you signed.

Voice is more problematic, but you could of course agree over encrypted e-mail on a shared secret to use for authentication. There are of course many, many fancy crypto systems for telephony.

But PGP, or just basic procedural security, would have defeated this attack trivially.

[Chris Williams]

Phew. Carry on, that planet.

. . . hang on, they all do _use_ this stuff, don't they?

[Alex]

Apparently not...