The Navy will soon have an exclusive cadre of cyber warriors to combat cyber terrorism.With this the Navy will be first among the armed forces in the country to have exclusive cadre of cyber warriors.

Naval sources said in New Delhi, the process of recruiting its first batch of dedicated officers for information technology who would work at creating networks for the maritime force, man the networks and maintain the systems,has been set in motion .

It is now looking at recruiting engineering, information technology and computer science graduates as short service commissioned officers for whom the training will begin in December.

The navy has also created a separate cell for communications, space and network centric operations under a rear admiral-rank officer, who would function as the assistant chief of naval staff.

Our correspondent reports,though not a direct reason for setting up this exclusive information technology cadre, the Indian Navy had faced one of its worst cyber attacks on its Eastern Command headquartered at Visakhapatnam when a pen drive used by some of its officers had led to sensitive, secret information being passed on to China due to a malware in the device.

The navy had set up a probe into the role of six of its officers for breaching the cyber security protocol at Visakhapatnam.