After website of the Ministry
of Defence was hacked, websites of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of
Law and the Ministry of Labour are also down now.
The MHA site is off-line
while the sites of Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Law and Department of Legal
Affairs, MoL&J, GoI have gone through some unexpected error.
The hacked Ministry of
Defence website was earlier showing certain letters saying the website
encountered an unexpected error and please try again later.
Now the site has also been taken
down as restoration work is going down on it. And the similar experiences with
MHA, Law Ministry and MoL says they might also have faced such problems.
The hacked website has a Chinese Zen character on top of it that says some Chinese hackers may be behind it as the relations between both countries have been quite high tense in recent days. Zen means rigorous self-control, meditation and insights into personal nature and it might be a warning for India, as most of the Chinese thinkers (hackers here) keep on doing.
On MoD hacking, Defence
Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says action has been initiated to trace down the
cause and the website will be restored shortly. She has also assured of steps
taken to prevent such an eventuality in future.
Nirmala Sitharaman
@nsitharaman
Action is initiated after the
hacking of MoD website ( http://mod.nic.in
). The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step
required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken.
@DefenceMinIndia @PIB_India @PIBHindi
A detailed response from the
Government of India is yet to come.
The government websites are continuously hacked in India but when it happens with important ministries like the Ministry of Defence, it is worrisome.
Between April 2017 and March 2018, over 22,000 websites were hacked in India and they included 114 government portals, data from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) says. The information was given by the Minister of State for Electronics and IT K.J. Alphons in the Lok Sabha.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) data also reveals that total 74 websites including six government websites hosted on NICNET were hacked in 2017 and till February 2018.
Before that, the Lok Sabha was informed in February 2017 that over 700 websites of central ministries and departments were hacked between 2013 and 2016.
©SantoshChaubey
