The Cyber Crime team of the Central Crime Branch on Saturday arrested a 23-year-old software professional on the charge of hacking into www.aiadmkallindia.org, the official website of the AIADMK. The website was hacked on November 2 by individual/individuals claiming to be the Pakistan Haxors Crew (PHC).
According to sources at the Metropolitan Magistrate Court, Egmore, the suspect P. Eswaran, a resident of Vyasarpadi, is a computer science graduate and was employed with a leading IT firm in Bangalore. The youngster has a penchant for hacking, and has many hacking tools on his laptop, which was seized by police.
Police officials said Mr. Eswaran had on many occasions entered the administrative pages of the party site illegally. However, it is yet to be confirmed whether Eswaran had actually defaced the site on Deepavali day, claiming to be the PHC and posting its logo and pro-Pakistani slogans.
Last week, after the hack, representatives from the AIADMK party office on Lloyds Road, Royapettah, lodged a complaint with the Office of the Commissioner of Police and a case was registered by the Cyber crime team of the Central Crime Branch. Police sources said the hackers had defaced only the homepage but did not tamper with any other part of the portal. The site has been blocked now and a special team is conducting the probe.
Eswaran has been booked under Section 66 of the IT Act. The section stipulates, “Whoever commits hacking shall be punished with imprisonment up to three years, or with fine which may extend up to two lakh rupees, or with both.”
Sources with the Computer Science department at Anna University said that a police team had approached them on Tuesday seeking help in the hacking case but they could not do much. A professor at the university said the hacking could have been done by someone in India, possibly Chennai, as it is possible to mask the location. They were advised to consult Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Police officials then sought the help of C-DAC, a research and development organisation of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology. C- DAC officials said their counterparts at the resource centre for Cyber Forensics in Thiruvananthapuram are working with Chennai police officials. “We gave them primary information after investigating their server files. We have asked for more log files from them,” a C- DAC official said.
He also added that once the log files reach them, they will be able to figure out the breach in a few days. “We have given them some leads. But we have also asked for information about filters in their databases and websites to know how the hack was planned and made possible,” he added.
Police officials said with the preliminary information provided by C- DAC, they had tracked down Eswaran, who had unlawfully logged in as an administrator on the party website.
