Web pages of defence, home and law ministry crashed on Friday. the MHA has purportedly been using free and open source SSL protocol to encrypt data that can be easily bypassed. NIC, which maintains all government websites, has been asked to investigate

by Chayyanika Nigam

About a month after Mail Today reported that various government ministry websites are vulnerable to hacking, the web pages of defence ministry, home and law ministries crashed on Friday, raising suspicion that they had been hacked.

The MHA website was hacked on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily block it. First it was the ministry of defence website that started leading to an error and some Chinese characters appeared on it.

Then the websites of three other ministries home, law and labour also went down, opening to error pages.

In the report published by Mail Today on March 12, it was mentioned that the MHA has purportedly been using free and open source SSL protocol to encrypt data that can be edited by any programmer and bypassed by any hacker. Since MHA is using open source SSL, even malware can be uploaded and the data of all the users can be accessed by the hackers, cyber experts told Mail Today.

A hacker can easily change the content of the website, the report said.

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who had reported the case to be of hacking, tweeted to say that her ministry's website will be restored shortly: Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website. The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken.

Sources said the National Informatics Centre or NIC, which maintains all government websites, has been asked to investigate.