Websites of DU, IIT and AMU targeted by ‘hackers from Pak’

SEVERAL GOVERNMENT websites were temporarily hacked on Tuesday, allegedly by a group of Pakistani hackers, with propakistan and anti-indian Army messages appearing on their home screens.

Websites of educational institutions, including Delhi University (DU), Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and the Indian Institute of Technology-delhi (IIT-D), were among those that were hacked, purportedly through a common server.

The Pakistan Haxors Crew (PHC) claimed responsibility for the hacking. In October last year, they had claimed to have hacked over 7,000 Indian websites. On Tuesday afternoon, as websites — including that of the National Aerospace Laboratories — were hacked one after the other, people took to social media to share images of the message written in white and red ink on a black background. Apart from invoking Kashmir, the message also said that the hacking was in response to “Code-man’s hack of railways.gov.pk”.

In an email to all students and faculty members with regard to the hacking, Head of Department of the Computer Services Centre, Iit-delhi, Huzur Saran, said, “Just to clarify, the Iitdelhi servers were not hacked but there was a hacking in the Ernet Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Since the name iitd.ac.in is registered with Ernet, anybody trying to look up (the same) will first ask Ernet servers who are supposed to refer the request to Iit-delhi servers.”

“However, for some reason, the Ernet servers data record was changed so that all requests for IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and DU were being redirected to fake outside servers which is outside our control. We have worked with Ernet to correct the relevant DNS referral records immediately. Ernet is also investigating how their DNS referral records were attacked and changed,” he added.

DU Registrar Tarun Kumar Das said: “The website of University of Delhi was inaccessible from outside the campus for some time due to some problems in the Domain Name Servers (DNS) pointing incorrectly to another site. The problem was detected and immediately rectified by contacting Ernet, who has provided the Domain Name for University of Delhi.”

Pakistan Haxors Crew claimed responsibility. They had claimed to hack 7,000 sites earlier