security
Pakistan Cyber Army Strikes Again
Shahina KK Shahina KK 23 Jun, 2011
First the Cochin Port Trust’s, and now Kerala’s civil supplies department website has been hacked
KOCHI ~ ‘Free Palestine and Kashmir. Palestine+Kashmir =One struggle, End occupation’—this was the message Sekharan Athanical saw when he opened the website of Kerala government’s civil supplies department. Athanical works in Akshaya Kendra, the infotech project that gives technical assistance to the government in providing services.
“On 9 June morning, a few people came to register their applications [for ration cards]. When I opened the website, I noticed a flag of Pakistan. It took a few minutes to realise that the site had been hacked.” He informed higher officials. “I called up the director of National Informatics Centre, which has been maintaining the site. I asked them to immediately put down the site,” says MS Jaya, director of the department of civil supplies.
A few months ago, in January, the Cochin Port Trust site too had been hacked, and the same screen shot turned up. “The IP address belongs to Karachi in both cases. A group called Pakistan Cyber Army is suspected to be behind this. Now it is for the CBI to follow up,” says Manoj Ebraham, Thiruvananthapuram city police commissioner .
Kerala’s police officials are sceptical of the CBI making a breakthrough, since the CBI’s website itself was hacked a few months earlier by Pakistan Cyber Army. “The hackers operate from different countries like Pakistan, Turkey, etcetera. We need an international consensus to effectively check this cyber war,” says Jacob Punnoose, DGP of Kerala.
Investigating officers say that around 1,500 Indian websites have been hacked so far; most of them of government departments. “In India, hacking a website does not severely hamper the functioning of the department. If this had happened in the US or some other developed country, the entire system would have collapsed. But we have to see that our websites are properly protected,” says Ebraham.
“Websites of government departments are very poorly maintained,” says infotech expert and hacktivist (one who uses hacking for social activism) Anivar Aravind. “Poor content management systems give opportunities to hackers. The security measures of these sites are not updated.”
More Columns
The Great American Comeback Siddharth Singh
‘AIPAC represents the most cynical side of politics where money buys power’ Ullekh NP
The Radical Shoma A Chatterji