Indian Govt Websites Becoming Hackers Paradise

Website hacking, especially of government sites, has attained critical mass in India and the Centre is donning the riot gear.

The last few months have seen hackers attack the website of the Ministry of railways, Air cargo customs (Mumbai), Forward Markets Commission, National Institute of Health and Family Welfare, National Institute of Social Defence, department of administrative reforms and public grievances, wireless planning and coordination wing, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, department of information technology, and the Anthropological Survey of India.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), a DIT body, is in the process of implementing a high-end attack detection solution to make the systems, especially government-owned ones safer.

The websites were hacked by exploiting technical vulnerabilities in the operating systems, web server, database software and application software.

Yet stats show that despite all the efforts, the number of security-related incidents of hackers crashing Indian websites has been growing continuously. In January, 87 security incidents were reported compared with 45 in December 2007. Out of all the incidents, 47% were related to phishing, 21% unauthorised scanning, 25% incidents related to virus/worm under the malicious code category and 7% were related to technical help under other categories, reveal a government data.

The MHA pointed out that in the recent past, a number of government sites hosted in the servers of private companies, or those hosted in servers located outside India, were targets of different hacker groups. The home ministry and DIT want all ministries and departments to host their sites on National Informatics Centre (NIC) or ERNET (Education and Research Network) as a possible solution.

Facts:

» India remained an internet hackers' paradise during the first half of the current calendar year with 1,752 websites being defaced, according to an analysis by the Department of Information Technology.

» In the first half till June this year, 39 '.gov.in' websites were defaced, which is 15 per cent of the total number of hacked sites in the '.in' domain while 81 '.co.in' websites were defaced in this period, according to Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) which handles computer securities incidents.

» Of the total 1,752 Indian websites defaced, 67.5 per cent were '.com' domain websites and 15.9 per cent were '.in' websites.

Related Posts by Categories