Over 700 government portals have been hacked in the last four years, according to official data given in Lok Sabha
Several government websites abruptly crashed simultaneously on Friday including that of Ministry of Defence and Home raising fears of a hacking attempt but officials said it was due to an error.
Characters in a Chinese script appeared on Defence Ministry website home page.
"Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website (http://mod.nic.in ). The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken," tweeted Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
The websites of Ministry of Labour and Law were also down. Errors detected in about 10 websites.
Over 700 government portals have been hacked in the last four years, according to official data given in Lok Sabha.
The hacking fear was triggered as the Indian Air Force gave out details of a mega exercise it will be carrying out over the next two weeks, said sources.
Late Friday, the National Informatics Centre said that the websites had not been hacked and that the error was due to technical issues.
After due diligence the officials of National Informatics Centre said that Ministry of Defence and any other website hosted in the NIC data centre have not been hacked and there has been no cyber attack of any nature. The site showed what appeared to be a Chinese character and it was understandable that the site was perceived to be hacked . However , it has since been identified that the sites have not been hacked . Since late afternoon today , due to a technical issue in storage, about 10 Government websites hosted in the NIC data centre became inaccessible to the public . The website of Ministry of Defence , MHA , Department of public enterprises, Election commission, EPFO, Ministry of Labor, Department of Science & Technology are up & running and the NIC team assures the citizens that services would be restored soon for the other websites.
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