Pakistan hackers target Bengaluru school website

Bengaluru: With independence days of both India and Pakistan falling on subsequent days, there’s always a sense of turmoil during the period. While there isn’t any bloodshed, there are certainly a lot of casualties in the cyber warfare between hackers from the neighbours.

A victim of this is the webpage of Vinayaka Public school. On Sunday, parents and students were shocked to see the page with crossbones and the Pakistan flag, along with expletives against India.

“I was working on our school website, updating the events list of our school. To my shock, the website claimed to be hacked, with a message saying, ‘Happy Independence Day Pakistan. This is a revenge for Indian hackers hacking Pakistan government website.’ The message came with heavy use of expletives,” said Ms Uma Mohan, principal, Vinayaka Public School.

“The school website is the window to the people to know how their students are faring and how the school is run. It is a shame that people would stoop so low as to attack the website of an academic institution,” she said.

Ms Pallavi, Director of Amity Infotech, the company that manages the background and hosting of school’s website, said, “They hacked into the dashboard and administrative controls of the site and started creating multiple user accounts, giving way to more hackers to infiltrate. They then proceeded to delete all the stored data within the site and replaced it with a single webpage to brag about their achievements”

She said, “We were unable to trace their location, because of the multiple accounts. But we managed to revert the situation by deleting all user accounts and using an old backup of the site.”

The hackers claimed that this was in retaliation to when Indian hackers defaced government websites of Pakistan and assured that all the data stored on the website has been completely erased.