Hyderabad: Just a day before the budget
for 2012-13 financial year was to be presented in the Andhra
Pradesh Assembly, an unidentified hacker broke into the
official government website budget.ap.gov.in, sending
the state administration into a tizzy.
The hacker, apparently from a foreign location,
created additional pages dz.htm and x.htm to the
budget.ap.gov.in website and named himself as BBOY1, sources
in the state Information Technology and Communications
Department said.
Besides, 26 other official websites of different state
government departments, including the important government
orders site goir.ap.gov.in, were also found to be hacked and
additional pages dz.htm and x.htm were added to each site, the
sources said.
The websites were "temporarily shut down for
facilitating incidence response and analysis" but the sites
have not been defaced nor was data affected, according to IT&C
Department.
What has caused concern in the administration was the
fact that the hacker(s) broke into the State Data Centre (SDC)
maintained by Wipro at the financial district here. The SDC is
monitored by a composite team comprising officials of National
Informatics Centre while KPMG is the third party
auditor.
"The hacking has happened in three stages: the State
Data Centre, the government servers and the websites of
different departments like General Administration, Commercial
Taxes, Horticulture, Remote and Interior Areas Development,
Government Gazettes, etc. The hacking has been done from a
foreign location going by the algorithms used," a senior
official of IT&C Department said.
As per normal practice, the budget data is uploaded on
to the website and stored in a "virtual location" within the
same domain hours ahead. Once the budget is presented in the
Assembly, the entire content is "migrated" to the actual page
for open access.
Finance Department officials, however, maintained that no
data related to the 2012-13 Budget was uploaded on the website
yet. They were unwilling to say whether any data has been
uploaded to the virtual location on the website.
Finance Minister Anam Ramanarayana Reddy, who is
scheduled to present the budget in the Assembly at 12.10 pm
tomorrow, said there's no possibility of any leakage of budget
data. "The hacking of the website will not hamper my budget
presentation," he said.
State IT&C Minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah held a quick
review with officials of his department to know the details
about hacking.
"Details about the hacking have been sent to Indian
Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and they have been
requested for access logs and screen shots for analysis. The
CERT-In report is expected in a day," Ponnala said.
The Cyber Crimes Cell of the Crime Investigation
Department launched an investigation immediately after state
Chief Secretary Pankaj Dwivedi lodged a complaint about the
hacking of government websites.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, February 16, 2012, 20:05