NEW DELHI – Mandarin character in an error message on the inaccessiblewebsite of the ministry of defence, a tweet by the defence minister thathinted at a possible hacking, and the subsequent inaccessibility of atleast nine other government websites, created panic on Friday about apossible mass cyber attack aimed at India by Chinese hackers, but it provedto be a false alarm.
National cyber security chief Gulshan Rai said the 10 websites hosted bythe National Informatics Centre went down after a hardware failure. Theinitial reaction of the defence minister, as well as the spokespersons ofsome of the other ministries (who did not know why their websites weredown) was that there had been a hack.
“There is no hacking or coordinated cyber attack on website of centralministries. There was a hardware failure in the storage network system atthe NIC which resulted in a number of government websites being serviced bythat system going down. We are working to replace the hardware and thesewebsites will be up soon,” said Rai.
Rai is the top cyber security official in the Prime Minister’s Office. Hesaid in all 10 government websites went down and few of them including thatof the Central Vigilance Commission and civil aviation ministry have beenrestored.
The rapid inaccessibility of the government websites were reminiscent of atextbook distributed denial of service or DDOS attack where users can’taccess a website because bots load it with traffic and queries. TheMandarin character complicated matters further, but it turned out that itstands for Zen, after a design theme offered by Drupal, an open-sourcecontent management system for websites.
The fact that the websites went down on account of a hardware failure isstill worrying, say experts, as is the fact that they didn’t seem to have aback-up.
Friday evening’s alarm was triggered by defence minister NirmalaSitharaman’s tweet that said, “Action is initiated after the hacking of MoDwebsite. The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, everypossible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future willbe taken.”