Agency Alert: ISI planning to wage "virtual war" against India

New Delhi:The Indian intelligence agencies have sounded an alert about a nefarious design of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) which has allegedly created a terror group to wage a "virtual war" against India, a source in the security set up informed here on Thursday.

While confirming that a report has been forwarded to the Ministry for "appropriate preventive action", the agencies has reported that the ISI's new brigade has been assigned the task of carrying out its operations by using newly created social media handles and hashtags.

"Thousands of handles and hashtags are being created to fuel anti-India sentiments. The ISI is in the process of hiring around 550 tech-savvy persons, who also have deep knowledge in handling and managing social media platforms," the official in the security set up said.

The report submitted to the MHA further said that ISI has put in place a plan to distribute such hired persons in a dozen odd teams and assign them the task to radicalise Indian youth and draw them towards terrorism in a number of ways.

The Intelligence official said that the report also mentions about a recent meeting organised by ISI in Rawalpindi, where the plan was chalked out to allot the tasks of waging '1000 fights with India by exploiting the cyberspace to further this agenda.'

This would be something similar to the fake news circulation with the help of morphed video of public beating Muslims youths which was circulated during many occasions in the county to flare up communal tensions, the official said.

Security experts are of the view that ISI has devised the online mode to foment trouble in India, which is also low cost in its nature, to avoid increasing international pressure to stop supporting terrorist organisations and similar attempted were also made in Kashmir and other parts of the country to flare up communal tension.(UNI)