The Asian Age:Saturday,February 11, 2012.
In a reply to an RTI petition, the National Information Centre, under the ministry of Communications and Information Technology, confessed this Thursday that nine government websites were hacked in the recent past.
The websites were lucky as hackers only seemed to be defacing home pages by posting objectionable content. This raises questions about the safety and security of other related government websites that even hold more sensitive information. India, after all, plans to build web censorship, alongside plans to create a database for its billions.
What is even more perplexing is the fact that this is not the government’s first time. In 2011, a total of 117 websites were hacked between January and June.
In October, a Pakistan-based hacker defaced eight Indian government websites and we couldn’t even stop the intrusion.
NIC’s reply also added: “A number of hacking attempts are made on daily basis on governments websites hosted on NICNET servers. It is not possible to accurately quantify these. The attempts are usually effectively blocked by security controls in place.”
However, the measure taken to prevent more of them just doesn’t seem enough. A case of misplaced priorities? Objectionable content on blogs are obviously less severe than the ones plastered on government websites, by foreign countries.
When you try breaking through big daddy’s cyber gates, consequences might be severe. But the fact that somebody did break in, is dangerous, embarrassing and calls for better security and fast !
One of the biggest threats in the cyber world is hacking. The reasons behind these attacks range from control of power, monetary gains to doing it just for the kicks. Hack attacks are also not big enough reasons to raise an alarm but when government websites become victims of regular and incessant hacking it’s time to go into a huddle.
The websites were lucky as hackers only seemed to be defacing home pages by posting objectionable content. This raises questions about the safety and security of other related government websites that even hold more sensitive information. India, after all, plans to build web censorship, alongside plans to create a database for its billions.
What is even more perplexing is the fact that this is not the government’s first time. In 2011, a total of 117 websites were hacked between January and June.
In October, a Pakistan-based hacker defaced eight Indian government websites and we couldn’t even stop the intrusion.
NIC’s reply also added: “A number of hacking attempts are made on daily basis on governments websites hosted on NICNET servers. It is not possible to accurately quantify these. The attempts are usually effectively blocked by security controls in place.”
However, the measure taken to prevent more of them just doesn’t seem enough. A case of misplaced priorities? Objectionable content on blogs are obviously less severe than the ones plastered on government websites, by foreign countries.
When you try breaking through big daddy’s cyber gates, consequences might be severe. But the fact that somebody did break in, is dangerous, embarrassing and calls for better security and fast !
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