NEW DELHI: The official website of the Union Home Ministry was hacked on Sunday, following which the government has blocked it. After the website was hacked, the National Informatics Centre that hosts all the government websites immediately blocked it for maintenance and restoration exercise, said official sources.
Teams of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) have also been pressed into service to identify the hackers and the source server through which the website was hit, said sources.
Pakistani hackers had in January hacked the official website of the elite counter-terror force National Security Guard (NSG) and defaced it with profanity-laden messages against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, besides other anti-India material.
According to the latest official data, more than 700 official websites of various Central and State government departments were hacked in the last four years and as many as 8,348 people were arrested for involvement in cyber crimes during the period.
The Union government has already initiated several policy, legal and technical measures such as audit of the systems and networks, increasing awareness in the area of cyber security, sharing threat-related information with stakeholders, issuing advisories on such threats through CERT-IN and National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) to address the issue of cyber hacking.