Upping the ante in the cyberwar with India, Pakistani hackers on Monday targeted a website of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and some sub-domains of Doordarshan websites hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Though NIC sources in New Delhi refused to either confirm or deny whether the Defence Ministry’s Department of Defence Production website ‘ddpmod.gov.in’ had been hacked or brought down for maintenance, screenshots of the website shared earlier with The Hindu show its defacement by Team MadLeets.com, the same group that had claimed responsibility for hacking Indian websites on Republic Day.
“NIC India stamped by Team Madleets … Security is an illusion,” said the message posted on the defaced Defence Ministry website.
According to sources in the Global Cyber Security Response Team (GCSRT), Bangalore, the Pakistani hackers, who had defaced more than 2,000 websites on Republic Day, now attacked more than 20 Indian websites hosted by the NIC and managed to breach the security of the Defence Ministry’s website, besides a few other websites of government organisations and sub-domains of Doordarshan websites, exposing the chinks in the country’s cybersecurity infrastructure.
An official in the NIC in New Delhi said all the websites, except that of the Department of Defence Production, shown to have been targeted by hackers were not in the public domain. “They are only testing sites and were awaiting security clearance,” the official said.
