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.