In the ongoing Indo-Pak cyber war, hackers have targeted websites of municipal bodies in Karnataka and successfully defaced as many as 66 of them.
Even though the home pages and internal pages are not affected, the hackers identifying themselves as “PakCyberPyrates” breached the security and uploaded an index file, causing the defacement.
They indicated that the hacking was in retaliation to the defacement of the Pakistan People’s Party’s website a few days ago by an Indian hacker with handle “Bl@ck Dr@gon” in protest against the party leader Bilawal Bhutto’s remarks on Kashmir.
The affected websites include those of the municipal bodies of Kolar, Davangere, Koppal, Jewargi, Gulbarga, Hassan, Bagalkot, and Chitradurga among others.
As all the hacked websites had been hosted on the same server, cyber security experts said the hackers might have searched all the index pages of the hosted websites and replaced them with another index page carrying their message.
Meanwhile, officials of the Department of Municipal Administration, who initially said they had no knowledge of the cyber attack, later confirmed the defacement of 66 of the 213 websites of the department.
“We are manually removing the inserted index file. We will take counter-measures to prevent such breach of security in future,” said an official in charge of managing the websites of the department, who did not wish to be named. “The websites will remain accessible to the public. We will take corrective measures without bringing down the websites,” the official added.
Though the websites were active, Mirza Faizan of the Global Cyber Security Response Team, Bangalore, said website managers will have to find the corrupted code on all the affected websites and replace it with a new code, which could be a time-consuming process.
Malicious codeIf a hacker had managed to breach security, it was possible to insert a malicious code with the intent of infecting the computers of even visitors, thus making them vulnerable to viral attacks, he said.
