Hackers have struck again with nearly 10 websites belonging to various ministries and departments of the government of India coming under attack in the last 24 hours.
NEW DELHI: Hackers have struck again with nearly 10 websites belonging to various ministries and departments of the government of India coming under attack in the last 24 hours. The hackers are suspected to be from China, though there was no official confirmation.
Confirming the cyber attack, a senior IT ministry official told DNA, “Low to medium intensity cyber intrusions into web servers maintained by the Indian government have been reported.”
The IT ministry’s computer emergency response team downplayed the violations calling them routine efforts by other parties to map out networks. Turn to p17
“Nearly 7,000 websites are hacked every year in India which means that on an average 19 sites are hacked a day. For us this is routine business, not a cyber attack,” a top CERT official told DNA.
Government officials, who tried to access the websites, reported problems like not being able to log into the email servers and not being able to transfer files through the networks. A few websites had to be shut down.
By Friday afternoon, the glitches had been fixed and most of the 10 sites were functioning normally again.
In a significant shift, government officials who deal with cyber attacks refused to name any country as suspect. Last month, the ministry of external affairs had alleged its networks had been compromised by suspected Chinese hackers.
Two years ago the international diplomatic community began taking the threat of Chinese hackers seriously. Last year, within a span of six months beginning May, the UK, US, France and Germany claimed that suspected Chinese hackers had broken into their web servers. In September last year, DNA first reported that suspected Chinese hackers had breached cyber security at high levels in the government of India as well with many cabinet ministers complaining that their emails accounts had been hacked.
However, in the absence of any clinching evidence, the global diplomatic community could not risk pointing fingers at China especially after the embarrassment Estonia suffered. In May last year Estonia had alleged that its government networks had been violated by hackers backed by the Russian government. In January this year, it was revealed that the attacks had been carried out by a disgruntled college hacker.
Even a continuing series of sophisticated cyber assaults is no longer evidence of another country’s government being involved, said a senior official familiar with India’s cyber command. The hackers could simply be out there to make money by setting up malware in a government network. “We need to protect our systems better. There is no point blaming anyone anymore,” the official added.
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