Hackers attempts @gov.org

New Delhi: Nowadays, government departments are facing big threats from some hitherto unfamiliar elements. Remote injection, authorization bypass and Cult of the Dead Cow are those that make up a wider nightmare of departments of Railways, TRAI, Customs, among others, reported The Economic Times.

Website hacking has attained critical momentum in India. The last few months have seen hackers attacking the website of TRAI, Indian Railways, Department of Telecom, Air Cargo Customs, National Institute of Social Defence, Forward Markets Commission, National Institute of Health and Family Welfare and BSNL, among others.

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The hackers even disfigured the website of department of information technology, the nodal agency that is supposed to solve the very issue of hacking. Hackers have also tampered with the website of the wireless planning and coordination wing of the Department of Telecom, the body which handles the sensitive issue of spectrum allocation.

To stop the menace, the DIT says it is in the process of hosting all the servers of the key ministries in the country itself.

"We have entrusted the National Informatics Centre (NIC) with this task and the servers of most of the ministries have been moved to the government body," a DIT official said. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), a DIT body, is in the process of implementing a high-end attack detection solution to make the systems, especially government-owned ones, safer. CERT-IN is also installing a network flow-based threat assessment solution to check the vulnerability of a particular website.

Despite all these efforts, the number of security-related incidents (of hackers crashing Indian websites) has been growing steadily. In January, 87 security incidents were reported as compared to 45 in December 2007. Out of all the incidents, 47 percent were related to phishing, 21 percent unauthorized scanning, 25 percent incidents related to virus under the malicious code category and seven percent incidents were related to technical help under other categories, government data reveal.

In January, only 30 incidents of defacement were reported compared to 509 in December and 305 in November. According to industry sources, the government sector now accounted for 30 percent of all defaced Indian websites in 2007, when compared to about 27 percent in 2006.