BHUBANESWAR: Suspected cyber terrorists hacked into an unofficial website of Ganjam Regional Transport Officer (RTO) and posted Pakistani flags and inflammatory messages on the home page.
The website - www.rtoganjam.com- was apparently hacked at least four days back but came to light on Sunday. Ganjam Police immediately registered a case at Chhatrapur police station and began investigation. DIG, Southern Range, Amitabh Thakur said the Crime Branch will be requested to help the probe since the agency has expertise in cyber crime investigation.
Abbas Abraham, claiming to be an administrative manager with Pak Cyber Crews, took responsibility for the breach and warned of more such attacks on Indian websites, mostly government agencies, in future. He also runs Facebook as well as Twitter accounts and claims to have hacked several Indian sites in recent times.
Additional Director General of Crime Branch Bijay Kumar Sharma said the RTO website contained only forms, road accident awareness messages and did not host any serious data. “Chhatrapur police have begun preliminary probe. We will take up the matter on Monday and get a trace of the internet protocol address,” he added. The Crime Branch, he said, would attempt to know if the hacking is a mischief by someone local or it was done from outside the country.
The website being a private initiative of the Ganjam RTO, Sharma said, it apparently did not have a strong firewall nor did it have adequate cyber security measures installed. Since most of the government websites, hosted and maintained by National Informatics Centre (NIC) have strong security features, it is very difficult to hack into the applications.
Ganjam RTO’s Pvt Website Hacked by Pak Cyber Crews
The incident has brought into light the cyber security of government websites which are now centre of e-governance measures of the State Government. However, the NIC, Bhubaneswar allayed fears of any breaches on government portals.
“Hackers from Pakistan target Indian government websites all the time but we keep upgrading the cyber security of the portals on a regular basis. Random checks are carried out at three different levels to examine our security measures,” Technical Director, NIC, RN Behera said.
In fact, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the apex government agency under Ministry of Communications and Information Technology for cyber security, also sends updates on cyber security to the States on a regular basis.
Behera said, cyber security compliance for the current year has been met and upgrade codes applied. Modifications and security audits are being carried out. The NIC hosts and maintains over 300 government websites and portals for the Government.