Tech trouble on MoD site sparks fears of hacking
In what may be a major cyber- war offensive that sent the security establishment into a tizzy, the websites of a few Union ministries, including ministry of defence ( MoD), the ministry of home affairs ( MHA), and the law and labour ministries were possibly “hacked” on Friday afternoon.
The MoD’s homepage, which was brought down at about 2 pm, showed up a blank page with a single Chinese character for some time while the MHA homepage said it was offline due to technical issues.
Reacting to the development, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted: “Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website ( http:// mod. nic. in). The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken.”
After due diligence the officials of NIC have confirmed that ministry of defence and any other website hosted in the NIC data centre have not been hacked and there has been no cyber attack of any nature. The site showed what appeared to be a Chinese character and it was understandable that the site was perceived to be hacked. However, it has since been identified that the sites have not been hacked. Since late afternoon on Friday, due to a technical issue in storage, about 10 government websites hosted in the NIC data centre became inaccessible to the public.
The website of ministry of defence, MHA, department of public enterprises, Election Commission, EPFO, ministry of labour, department of science & technology are up & running and the NIC team assures the citizens that services would be restored soon for the other websites.
Defence ministry officials had also said there were strong indications that organised hackers may be behind the effort and were possibly involved in defacing the MoD website.
On the other hand, National Cyber Security chief coordinator Gulshan Rai blamed it on a storage system hardware failure.
Mr Rai told this newspaper: “There is no cyber attack. There is no hacking of any government website.”