EXCLUSIVE: PROBE FLAGS 'SECURITY BREACH' AT BRAHMOS HQ, SAYS EX-DRDO DG CARRIED 'CONFIDENTIAL' FILE OUT
A former Director General (DG) of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is believed to have moved confidential company documents out of the premises of BrahMos Aerospace, according to DRDO Vigilance Department reports accessed exclusively by Firstpost.
The documents say that there is an instance that "confirms that there are definite chances of movement of important company documents out of BrahMos premises" by Sudhir Mishra, former DG, DRDO.
Mishra retired as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director (MD) of BrahMos Aerospace on 30 November, 2021.
How Sudhir Mishra allegedly moved the documents out
On the afternoon of his retirement day, a logistics company named Big Logistics India Pvt Ltd, was hired to take out roughly 40 boxes of various sizes along with several documents. The material was taken out of the company's headquarters without an "out pass", the Vigilance Department report claimed.
DRDO Vigilance Department report accessed by Firstpost
Firstpost accessed the entries made for Sultan, a person understood to be associated with the logistics firm, in a register.
Almost a month after his superannuation, on 28 December, 2021, Mishra, a senior DRDO scientist, returned "a number of files, company documents, and information". The materials he returned contained a file that was labelled 'CONFIDENTIAL'.
The returning of the documents resulted in the security breach coming to light. That led to an investigation detailing a significant lapse in security protocols at the firm.
Sudhir Mishra and BrahMos spokesperson did not respond to Firstpost's requests for comment. A DRDO spokesperson that Firstpost reached out to refused to go on record about the incident till the time of publishing.
The story will be updated with any responses received subsequently.
Security lapses
Although the investigation committee was told that no material had gone out of the BrahMos Aerospace office, there were various instances of "unnoticed and undocumented" items being removed from these premises.
The CCTV footage for a critical 15-day period, the documents show, were found to be missing. There were lapses in maintaining a mandatory 90-day backup of CCTV footage, too.
Moreover, the "out pass" register of returnable and non-returnable items for 90 days was not very well-maintained. The data in both the registers looked to be mixed.
A trend of security breaches at DRDO
In the past couple of years, there have been quite a few instances of data breaches and security lapses surrounding DRDO scientists.
In 2023, Pradeep Kurulkar, a senior DRDO scientist was sacked after investigations suggested that he was leaking information to suspected Pakistani spies. Kurulkar had reportedly been honey-trapped virtually.
A year prior to that, a 29-year-old native of Telangana, was arrested on charges of leaking sensitive information about one of India's weapons development programmes to a Pakistani spy. The man was an engineer with the DRDO laboratory in Hyderabad.
In 2018, there were reports of two scientists from the DRDO being detained by the Anti-terrorism Squad (ATS) for leaking confidential documents to a suspected Pakistan-based ISI agent. They, too, were suspected to have been targets of honey trapping.
2024-05-01T10:02:16Z dg43tfdfdgfd