India lags in cyber security: Experts

Bengaluru: The Defence, Law and Home Ministry on Friday were reportedly hacked at one go and the "possibility of sensitive data being leaked can't be ruled out," said cyber lawyer, Supreme Court and cyber forensic expert Neeraj Aarora.

"Somebody has hacked the websites after compromising the authentication details. Though some Chinese alphabets were found in the MoD website it could be anyone behind the hacking. It could be hackers from China, Pakistan or an insider, who has left the Chinese letters as red herring," said Aarora. He added that though the websites do not contain critical data, investigation should reveal to the extent of hacking. The hackers may have installed spyware or malware and may have hacked into sensitive data. This needs a serious investigation and immediate remedial action,” added the cyber lawyer.

Aarora said that the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which maintains all “government servers does not seem to be up to date with the current cyber threats and needs to do much more,” said Aarora.

Another cyber forensic expert said that the websites are like the “skin” of the entire system. “We do not know if only the face of the websites have been hacked or is it much more. Data protection in India remains a grey issue,” said the expert.

Meanwhile, the National Cyber Security Co ordinator Gulshan Rai maintained that the websites were not hacked soon after Defence Minster Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted that “action has been initiated after hacking of MoD website (mod.nic.in) according to cyber security experts all the three websites going down simultaneously cannot be a hardware problem.”