Finance Ministry, Planning Commission among those targeted
Government websites are turning out to be soft targets for hackers. In the last three months alone, as many as 112 websites, including that of the Planning Commission, the Finance Ministry and various State government agencies, were hacked or defaced.
“During the period December 2011 to February 2012, a total number of 112 government websites were hacked,” Minister of State for Communications and IT Sachin Pilot told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
While the website of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd was hacked on December 4, 2011 by the ‘H4tr!ck' hacker group, the websites of Finance, Health, Human Resource Development ministries and Planning Commission were also defaced. Various State government websites that came under attack were from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Sikkim, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Mr. Pilot said the Department of Information Technology and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that host the majority of government websites were upgrading their skills to tackle the ever-growing threat from hackers. Firewalls were being upgraded and new filters added to ensure that hackers could not target government websites.
Notably, the government had to face major embarrassment last year after the Central Bureau of Investigation website was hacked and defaced by programmers, who identified themselves as the “Pakistani Cyber Army.” It took weeks before the website was restored. However, it was after this episode that the NIC took various measures to prevent government websites from getting hacked. As per industry estimates, over 14,000 government and corporate websites were hacked/defaced in 2011.
Keywords: hacking, government websites, cyber crime, data security
Shejuguru is goingi irrelevant.. That's all i want to say...
Deptt of IT and cyber crime agencies in collaboration with NIC must recruit hackers in their departments to tackle this serious problem.Even Indian hackers are considered to be best in the world.I hope a hacker can give vulnerable information about hacking and its prevention.Using 64 bit SSL mechanism and introducing proxy server will prove to be the best option.
@MrPrivacy This is not a place to advertise yourself. And encryption is not a sure way always. By the way how many algorithms do you know and how many can you implement yourself or you just know openssl commands. The problem with government websites is that people working there do not know what are the vulnerabilities which have been exposed in the current working software they have. They do not even try to know. You need to privatize this and put an SLA on security.
I agree with veer...He is right and Dileep as well.
Hello,
How do we say that all that done by the poor govt employees? Most of
the time site development are done by private companies outsourced by
govt. It is nothing to do with govt or private. There should be a
serious dedicated technical team continuously monitoring upgrading upto
date.. Govt Employees too selected based on exams after exams friend.
(i am not a govt employee pl. note !!!)---senthil
With all due respect to the Mr. Joshi, the news about Bangladeshi
hackers, who hacked 20000 Indian sites (govt. and non-govt.)to protest
against the brutality of BSF at the Bangladeshi border, should also have
been reported. While the motivation behind the hacking are questionable,
it is important that the Indian public know what sentiments (and why)
countries other than Pakistan hold towards India.
You can prevent your website any kind of attack very easily but, people
who live in corruption will never do. Only way to make them secure is
not giving salary to NIC people if there site is hacked.
They must be best in country.
NIC does some real marketing for Microsoft. All the servers of NIC are on Microsoft servers. Netcraft site that does survey reveals this fact. When over 65 percentage of all the worlds servers are using free and open source Apache servers, Indian government feels it better to fund Microsoft and keep GDP figures high, rather than going in for the most preferred free and open source webserver software. That's the crux. Behind Microsoft servers, there are countless antivirus agencies lurking around for their fair share of pie. And this is their trick. These guys call themselves fictitious names that look real. Who in the world would think that people in some remote tribal village in mountaineous terrain would have access to Microsoft's latest backdoors ?
It is shame for a country that boasts as the IT supermarket of the
world, but then again this is what government bureaucracy does.
Try this with Private companies...
Shabby looking websites hacked, well they deserve it. How many times I have to comment on every aspect of over governance I see. it is poor poor and poor and I am have to be pessimist about it!
i agree with shejuguru.....
it is all due to "know u wht i want to say"
Most employees working in the Government sector are 40 plus, who would have learnt how to send an email at an age of 35. That is not a good age to learn a lot of new technical stuff. Government should invest hugely in the technology and utilize the expertise of Indian IT industry. The orthodox mentality of the bureaucrats should change and start adapting to the modern times.
Its not related to Quota system dude.Actually the people who works there,haven't upgraded.NIC must update their employees.
It should happen as expected because the people who are supposed to
protect these websites from hacking have reached there not based on
there talents but purely on Quota(Reservation) basis.
It is high time that Quota system has to be stopped immediately and
Merit system has to be introduced.
Thank god there is not Reservation system in the Private Enterprises or
else there wont be any Billionaires from India.
Just do not understand why government organizations do not encrypt what
they store. If they did, it would not matter that they were hacked. At
threadthat.com, we protect your privacy by encrypting every bit of
information users share. We even allow the users to create and share
their own passkeys. It's not rocket science.
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