KOCHI: The accused duo arrested in connection with the theft of computer hardware from the Indigenous Aircraft Carrier had accessed the contents of the solid-state drives (SSD) that they stole, the NIA probe has revealed. It was following this revelation that the NIA charged the duo under Section 66F (b) of the Information Technology Act for cyber terrorism against accused.
Sources said the probe revealed that the duo deleted contents from four of the five stolen SSDs, which is like a hard disk and is used to store files.“When we recovered the SSDs, data in four of them were found deleted. The accused, however, maintained that the data was deleted to retrieve the entire storage space of the SSD. But it should be noted that they also opened the files in the SSD before deleting them,” said a source.
NIA is probing whether the content was transferred to anyone. During their lie-detection test, the accused denied doing this. “We decided to retain Section 66F (b) of IT Act against the accused. The section states that cyber terrorism also includes unauthorised access to data and computer database that is restricted due to national security reasons. It is a scheduled offence which comes under the NIA’s ambit,” said an NIA official.