CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu has fixed security vulnerabilities in 10 government websites built on PHP while work on two others is under way, Information Technology (IT) secretary Atul Anand told TNIE. Four websites reported no vulnerabilities and all application owners have been alerted. No major citizen-facing portal or service was found vulnerable, he said.
The disclosure comes amid heightened scrutiny of government websites after India’s cybersecurity authorities identified vulnerable PHP installations.
Anand, however, said no government application had been taken offline because of the vulnerabilities, and that no exploitation attempts or security incidents have been detected in the state government’s IT infrastructure.
The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency, through the Tamil Nadu Computer Emergency Response Team (TN-CERT), is combining departmental inputs with independent verification to assess vulnerabilities and remedial measures. The applications under review are hosted in the TN State Data Centre, he said.
Vinayak Godse, DSCI’s chief executive, urged organisations to update PHP and restart their web servers immediately, and to take systems offline where patching is not possible.
Organisations can also deploy web application firewall to inspect live traffic and block exploits, he added.