There was embarrassing news for the Indian government this week as
one of its ministers was forced to admit that over 100 of its web sites
had been hacked in just three months at the beginning of the year,
including that of a state-owned telecoms company.
Minister for communications and IT, Sachin Pilot, revealed in a
written reply in parliament that a total of 112 sites had been
compromised from December 2011 to February 2012, Indian news service IANS
reported.
Also singled out was state-run telco Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
(BSNL), which was hacked and defaced in December allegedly by hackers
belonging to the ‘H4tr!ck’ group.
BSNL in particular came under attack from Pakistani hackers several
times last year, most notably from a group calling themselves the
Pakistan Cyber Army, and many of the hacks of government sites mentioned
by Pilot could be blamed on mischief makers from India’s fierce rival
across the border.
According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team,
there were 834 defacements of .in web sites in India during January this
year, with the figure rising to 1,425 for all sites.
The authorities certainly don’t seem to be getting any better at
deflecting such attacks given that around the same number of government
sites – 117 – were attacked in the entire first half of 2011, according
to an official
release.
This would seem to indicate that basic security measures are still
not been taken at the back end to bolster defences against common attack
methods including cross-site scripting and SQL injection.
It’s not just the public sector that has been found wanting though,
with Microsoft India’s online store still offline after being targeted
by alleged Chinese hackers.
Despite reassuring customers that their data was safe, Microsoft was
later forced
to admit that actually the hackers may well have nabbed credit card
details from what is thought to have been an unencrypted database.Courtesy: The Register, UK
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