Apart from creating cyber-security organisations down to the division-level to guard against cyber warfare and data thefts, the army top brass also underlined the urgent need for 'periodic cyber-security audits' by the Army Cyber Security Establishment.

'We have our cyber experts conducting cyber audit on our systems from time-to-time to check against possible bugs,' said an armed forces official.

During the cyber audits, the experts check the password strength of the accounts.

'We are being advised to give an alpha-numeric password with characters in upper and lower case,' the official added.

Generally the armed forces refrain from finding the sender's identity as it involves a long procedure of writing to the Google headquarters with proper authorisation. However, the Indian armed forces have also issued a set of 'do's and dont's' to contain the menace of cyber crime.

'We have been instructed to work on stand-alone computers with no internet connections. Moreover, we cannot keep any confidential data in our hard disks. Nobody is allowed to use a pen drive inside the South Block and the rule is strictly adhered to,' said another Indian Army official.

Also the Indian Army had issued circular to its officials asking them not to post work-related information like ranks, place of posting etc on social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook. The circular had asked soldiers to remove such information from their networking profiles in case they had already posted it.

The armed forces have also undertaken various measures to sensitise its officials on cyber usage.

(Ritu Sharma can be contacted at ritu.s@ians.in)