CWG Official Website Attacked by Pakistani & China Hackers

CWG Official Website Attacked by Pakistani & China Hackers

CWG Official Website Attacked by Pakistani & China Hackers

The audience at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium might have given a rousing welcome to the Pakistani contingent during the opening ceremony,but state-supported hackers in Pakistan and China were hard at work trying to deface official sites and disrupt data networks.

Experts from the department of information and technology had to keep a sharp vigil to prevent the hackers from either crashing sites or putting up demeaning messages intending to show India in poor light.The effort to foil the hackers intent on embarrassing India was no less intensive than on-ground security.

The attacks were traced to servers in Pakistan and China and while the hackers were purported to be individuals or non-state actors,the deniability for their sponsors was thin.The exercise is suspected to have been monitored by official agencies in both countries with the searchnet worm being the preferred weapon of attack.The attacks launched from China were the handiwork of students studying in technical institutes who are encouraged to take a go at targets identified by official agencies.Some of these universities are in close proximity to military establishments specializing in technical and IT-based offensive systems.

There were hundreds of attacks on the CWGs official website which were intended to put up insulting messages while the more serious attempts were aimed at data management systems.

Within a couple of hours of the opening ceremony of the mega event on October 3,hackers mostly traced to servers in China attacked the Games website,www.cwgdelhi 2010.org,forcing cyber security agencies to pay more attention to cyber security.

Though the cyber attackers have been traced to Pakistan as well,most of the hackers servers were found to be located in China, said a top government official.

SOURCE: TIMES OF INDIA