The State Government on Monday claimed that it has resorted most of the websites that were hacked on February 16.
According to Information Technology Minister Ponnala Laxmaiah, repeated attempts were made to hack again on the websites made operational at different times on Monday. However, the hacker’s attempts were not successful. He said that the attempts were made from Jakartha, Algeria and Turkey at different times.
The minister said that after finding addition of web pages on the 27 web sites hosted at APSDC, the attack was analyzed by CERT-In and found that the root cause is the vulnerability in website ‘christianminorities.ap.gov.in’.
Therefore, it was decided to get the security audit done on the web applications before restoration. The Cyber Security Works was engaged for application security audit. The applications certified after audit will be tested by Wipro ethical hacking team before hosting. Applications which are having vulnerabilities are required for rectification by the developers of the respective departments.
The websites, http://goir.ap.gov.in, http://fms.ap.gov.in, http://apscsc.ap.gov.in (redirection) and http://prohibitionexcise.ap.gov.in (redirection) and seven applications made up at APSDC were restored between Feb 16 and Feb 19.
Three websites, http://omc.ap.gov.in, http://omc4.ap.gov.in and http://www.apddcfoms.ap.gov.in are having problems which require department application team to address the issue. But these departments do not have their application developer/maintenance service provider at present.
The minister said that the audit of six other applications was in progress and they would be restored by Monday midnight. It has been is proposed for further examination of http://christianminoraties.ap.gov.in as this was the root cause and requires detailed analysis.
The Minister has called for a high-level meeting with officials from Information Technology and Communications Department, Investigating Agencies, Empanelled Agencies, Maintenance Agencies and the departments having the websites on February 22 for further discussions on this subject. (INN)