``They penetrated my personal computer at VECC here and wanted to have some information they thought I had on Pokharan. But like the proverbial thief who did not find any jewellery in the house and set it afire, they erased all data in utter despair,'' Sinha told a gathering of eminent scientists during the National Science Day celebrations at the Indian Science Congress association here Saturday. Both VECC under the department of Atomic Energy and Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), which Sinha heads, had been tight-lipped on the issue ever since the alleged `data leak' on the Pokharan tests hit headlines across the globe last year.

``It was an uneasy and eerie feeling to be hacked... Thank heavens, they (the hackers)never came back again,'' Sinha sighed, adding that the `bunch of kids called Milworm' certainly did not possess the means to hack more than E-mail and unclassified documents.

Narrating the sequence leading to the `fateful event', Sinha said that one of his post doctoral student who regularly chatted on E-mail with a colleague in BARC, Mumbai, had sent `coded' messages which the hackers mistook for classified information.

The coded names for Sinha and the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Pokharan-related terms contained in the messages misled the hackers, said Sinha. ``The poor thing (student) was just trying to be funny by ridiculing me and the Chairman, but he got into trouble,'' he added.