India: 112 government sites hacked

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.

Many of the sites hacked appeared to be those of government agencies in various regions of the sprawling country including Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Kerala, the report continued.

The website of state-owned telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was attacked for the fourth time on December 4, by a Pakistani hacker group called “H4tr!ck.” In fact, at least 22 websites under the Rajasthan state government were destroyed by hackers, mostly from Pakistan, in February. They deleted or stole data from the various sites of important departments including technical education, college education and finance, according to sources cited by India Times.

State government websites have very poor security practices. For example, most government websites in Rajasthan run on single server. This means if a hacker exploits a single vulnerability in any of the websites, he or she can compromise the other websites as well by taking control of the whole server. To make matters worse, when data is deleted, backups are simply uploaded back to website. Given that the sites are attacked again and again, it would appear that nothing is being done to actually fix the security issues.

This can’t go on forever: India is going to have to tap some of the bright minds in IT and get its act together. After all, India is the world’s second most populous country: it’s simply a question of putting the right people in the right positions.