Monday, September 15, 2008

Gujarat Government website been hacked

Yesterday I read this article on DivyaBhaskar website and immediately I realized that the official website of Gujarat Government is been hacked. If you read this news, one can find that it as it claims, http://suratpolicecommisioner.gujaratindia.com is hacked. But, as it clarifies that its not the actual website of Surat Police Commissioner. When I tried to access http://a.gujaratindia.com, it went to same page with pictures of terrorist like people and some comments in Urdu. Similarly, for any subdomain except "www" it was redirected to the same page. So, there are multiple possibilities of this hack. One of them is they somehow got access to admin site which resides on the hosting site. Which is possible with the hacked username/password. Other way to access hosting site is through hacking their server. The later option is possible when the server is not tightly secured. It seems that they didnt get control over the server, otherwise they would have hacked entire site than just the 'subdomain redirection'. One of the possiblities is, they could have found existing hack in the site and then managed to update their page on the server.

IP of hosting server is 66.152.162.114 located in New York. It is under control of Multacom Corporation. You can see full detail of the hosted server and registrant here. The webserver is Microsoft IIS.

This site is no more accessible, that's the good sign, as someone would be working to fix this. Though it was accessible just before 12 hours or so.

Most of the Gujarat Government websites are created and maintained by Ahmedabad based small companies like Sai Info, SilverTouch (now Semaphore) . SilverTouch created (and possibly maintaining also) GujaratIndia.com.

Last year there was another instance of finding pornographic material on one of the government department website. Government websites having old data or not updated frequently is a quite common news items in various news papers. Still all software contractors are same old guys since years.

Seems like this is the first technical interpretation of the hack, as Bhaskar news wasn't clear about this. Neither they said the site of Gujarat government is been hacked. Also, I could not find it in any news paper or blog or anywhere on internet.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This site is working okay now.
-Alpesh