Govt websites hacked off private servers
The MHA has said that in the recent past, a number of government sites hosted in the web servers of private companies or those hosted in servers located outside India were targets of different hacker groups.
NEW DELHI: Alarmed by the growing number of hacking incidences of government websites, the ministry of home affairs (MHA) has instructed all central ministries and departments not to host their websites in the servers of private companies or in overseas servers.
The ministry of home affairs, in its communication to the ministries and government departments, has said that they should host their sites only on central government and state government-owned servers, although it did not specify a time-frame for adherence to the missive.
The MHA has said that in the recent past, a number of government sites hosted in the web servers of private companies or those hosted in servers located outside India were targets of different hacker groups. As per government statistics, the first half of 2006 saw 1,752 reported incidents of Indian website defacements.
Of these, 67.5% were ‘com’ domain sites and 15.9% were ‘in’ domain websites. The statistics indicated an increase in ‘in’ domain defacement in comparison to the previous year. More alarmingly, in the sector wise defacement statistics, the government sector accounted for 27.3% of all the Indian websites that were defaced during the period.
The department of information technology (DIT) has also said that during the first half of 2006 there was also an increase in government website (.gov.in) defacement. In fact, even within the ‘.in’ domain, 39 government websites were hacked during this period representing 15.1% of the total ‘.in’ domain defacements.
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When asked about the basis of the MHA directive, a top DIT official told ET, “Apart from data loss or data theft, a web defacement incident can cause significant damage to the image of the organisation. The ministries and departments are being advised to host their sites on National Informatics Centre (NIC) or ERNET (Education and Research Network).” The MHA has also asked all government ministries and departments to adhere to the guidelines issued by the department of information technology with regard to this issue.
These guidelines address specific issues such as network security, network architecture, network products, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, intrusion protection systems, open proxy, spam prevention, host security, secure coding practices, SQL Injection, data base security and content management.
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