MCT website hacked, restored in few minutes

The website of the Municipal Corporation of Tirupati (MCT) was hacked, apparently by amateur hackers of Bangladesh, on Friday afternoon. It was restored within a few minutes.

The website acts as an information repository to the denizens, offering details of the civic amenities provided by the corporation and also the updates on the ‘Smart City’ project.

There is not much damage as the site neither holds any closely-guarded information, nor allows any financial transactions.

During the hacked period, it showed a black screen with the words ‘Bangladesh hackers’ on the first line, followed by ‘Hacked by D@rk_ Di@mond’, with a tag line saying “We are muslim and we are not a terrorist”.

The site is managed by Tirupati-based Stellar IT Applications, which hired server space from a third party, as is the practice in the IT circles. “We suspect that the third party’s server had chinks in its cyber security framework and hence succumbed to the designs of the hackers. We have shifted our data to a new server”, MCT Commissioner V. Vinaychand said.

The website has been in operation for more than a year and has faced hacking threat for the first time ever.

The corporation has formally lodged a complaint with the Tirupati Urban police.