On Friday, multiple Indian government websites were reported to be hacked, but there appears to be conflicting theories within the government itself.
The Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had earlier tweeted that the Ministry of Defence site had been hacked, putting the entire country into alarm. She even tweeted saying action had been initiated after the alleged hacking.
But as things developed since the first report, it is also likely that the websites weren’t actually hacked, instead, they were taken down for maintenance purposes. Gulshan Rai, India’s cybersecurity expert, confirmed the situation to The Hindu, highlighting it as a hardware failure.
As it turns out, the Defence Minister’s clarity on the matter has been subdued by Gulshan Rai’s admission. But the bigger question that everyone should be asking is – who’s telling the truth? Did Nirmala Sitharaman press the panic button without consulting the cybersecurity team, or is Gulshan Rai raising a smokescreen to downplay the situation?
Are the communication channels so cluttered that the information transmitted didn’t make it through in time? We all know about the existing state of cybersecurity in India, which also shows how vulnerable Indian government websites are.
According to experts like Pavan Duggal, India’s ministerial support on the digital world still relies on legacy systems that were last updated a few years ago.
Even India’s Cyber Security Policy was last updated in 2013, which clearly means attacks like ransomware or cryptomining haven’t even made it to their list of cyber warfare. A recently report suggests that over 22,000 websites in India were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018, which includes over 100 government websites.
But Pavan Duggal believes that a realistic number for them is much higher than whatever gets quoted in the public. As scary as that sounds, experts like Duggal have constantly suggested the need to strengthen India’s existing digital infrastructure, especially for high-level websites like the Ministry of Defence or even the Home Ministry.
Rakshit Tandon, director at Council of Information Security says that if it was a routine maintenance or a technical glitch, the government should have communicated that properly. He says that things like ‘Chinese characters’ do appear when hardware is moved about inappropriately. This particular instance of the websites being unavailable does not look like what the hackers would do.
However, Tandon says the government needs to get its communication channels in order and also upgrade its hardware systems.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)