Shimla: Hackers struck the government public relations department (DPR) website about a week ago forcing the department to take down the website and having it to rely upon emails, faxes and phones to reach out for dissemination of time bound information.
“It’s was about a week ago that we detected malicious activity on our website,” said Rajinder Singh, director public relations.
Sources claimed that besides the DPR website, others also which include the tourism website that were hosted on the gov.in domain server have been hit by a suspected Pakistan based hacker group.
“Since the attack and defacement of a page was noticed, the DPR website has been taken off and a partial restoration has been done to enable the department to carry out some of its functions,” said Priyatu Mandal, director of information technology department.
He added that the hackers breeched a security lapse in DPR website that did provide the department facilities for updating the content for multiple users.
“The passwords proved too easy to crack that possibly led to compromising of the website,” added Mandal.
However, he denied that other government websites also had been compromised.
An engineer of the IT department on conditions of anonymity disclosed, “there were security lapses in the DPR software application which was a very old one. Some viruses were detected and efforts are being made to fully restore the website.”
As Editor, Ravinder Makhaik leads a team of media professionals at Hill Post.
Spanning a career of over two decades in mass communication, as a Documentary Filmmaker, TV journalist, Print Media journalist and with Online & Social Media, he brings with him a vast experience. He lives in Shimla.
most of the government websites are never updated to latest security standards and this cause these issues. Still they never try and update their systems to prevent these attacks.
This is true , I agree with Rajneesh. Computerization is good step in govt working but computers are never in safe mode. We can see that most of the outsiders can access easily any of systems in govt offices
Now its a time to upgrade the security codes of all official websites.
Your blog or website can be compromised if a hacker obtains your password.
Hackers attack where they see weakness. A system that hasn’t been updated recently has flaws in it that can be taken advantage of by hackers.
The problem is not of the government. Its the system and the people running the system. I remember when there was a problem with result declaration at Dr Y S Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, they were not able to update new result for more then 2 weeks, just because there was not proper sanction from the higher authority. Higher authority who themselves does’t know how computer system works, and keep on running the dry runs of the so called computer system.