Threats of hacking or defacing government and corporate websites in India are increasing every year. Last year alone, over 14,000 such websites were defaced, disrupting functioning and productivity of these departments. The main reason behind this is the failure on part of these website managers to have a proper firewall to check cyber attacks.
One such case was that of the Central Bureau of Investigation. The website of the premier investigating agency was hacked and defaced by programmers early last year by those who identified themselves as the “Pakistani Cyber Army”. It took weeks before the website was restored, but it clearly exposed the preparedness on part of Department of Information Technology's National Informatics Centre (NIC), which hosts all major government websites, to handle such a situation.
Taking note of similar threats from the “Pakistani Cyber Army” to carry out “mass defacement” of other government websites, the NIC carried out a proper survey and plugged loopholes to avert any such future problems. However, the private and corporate sectors are still vulnerable to such threats. Though there are several IT tools to counter such threats, they are not always enough as hackers still find ways to breach the security system.
But now a global IT firm Cyberoam, a division of Elitecore Technologies, has created a unique ‘Web Application Firewall' (WAF) feature that adds a strong layer of protection to corporate websites and web-based applications that are becoming a frequent and favourite target of hackers.
“Last year we saw over 14,000 website defacement attacks on the Indian Government and corporate websites with 80 per cent web applications having some inherent deficiency. Most of these attacks remain unnoticed until a major security incident happens,” said Cyberoam Senior Vice-President (Product Management) Abhilash Sonwane. However, the cost-effective WAF security system, which repelled a wide variety of hand-crafted and open source automated attacks, would now help small and medium enterprises and other firms upgrade their firewall, he added.
Mr. Sonwane pointed out that with the Indian businesses growing fast and relying more on websites to promote themselves, they would have to keep strengthening firewalls of their websites. “Enterprise verticals that have web application firewalls as a critical business requirement include retail, e-commerce, large hosting services providers, IT organisations, telecom, healthcare, government and manufacturing,” he added.
