NEW DELHI: India remained an internet hackers' paradise during the first half of the current calendar year with 1,752 websites being defaced, according to an analysis by the Department of Information Technology.
In the first half till June this year, 39 '.gov.in' websites were defaced, which is 15 per cent of the total number of hacked sites in the '.in' domain while 81 '.co.in' websites were defaced in this period, according to Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) which handles computer securities incidents.
Of the total 1,752 Indian websites defaced, 67.5 per cent were '.com' domain websites and 15.9 per cent were '.in' websites.
There has been a phenomenal increase in the '.in' domain (India specific) defacements. Only in the H1 of the current year, a huge 278 '.in' websites were defaced in which major defacements were on the commercial Indian websites. In 2005, this figure was a total 373.
A high number of Country Code top level domain sites -- .co.in, .net.in, .gov.in, .org.in, .nic.in, .ernet.in, .ac.in and .res.in -- were defaced with commercial sector contributing 68.3 per cent of the defacements and Government sector had a share of 27.3 per cent of this.
Three Indian Government sites which were defaced on the VSNL network were -- www.fmc.com, www.railnet.com and www.ieg.com.
In the first half of 2006, web servers running on Windows were highly exploited.
Government officials say most defacements result from hackers using pre-fabricated exploits to gain administrative control of the target system and then replacing the web pages hosted on the system with their own systems.
On rare occasions, attackers may not have had an opportunity to gain any user-level privileges on the target server but were able to take advantage of poorly written web scripts or vulnerability of web servers to carry out the defacement.
Source : DNA
In the first half till June this year, 39 '.gov.in' websites were defaced, which is 15 per cent of the total number of hacked sites in the '.in' domain while 81 '.co.in' websites were defaced in this period, according to Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) which handles computer securities incidents.
Of the total 1,752 Indian websites defaced, 67.5 per cent were '.com' domain websites and 15.9 per cent were '.in' websites.
There has been a phenomenal increase in the '.in' domain (India specific) defacements. Only in the H1 of the current year, a huge 278 '.in' websites were defaced in which major defacements were on the commercial Indian websites. In 2005, this figure was a total 373.
A high number of Country Code top level domain sites -- .co.in, .net.in, .gov.in, .org.in, .nic.in, .ernet.in, .ac.in and .res.in -- were defaced with commercial sector contributing 68.3 per cent of the defacements and Government sector had a share of 27.3 per cent of this.
Three Indian Government sites which were defaced on the VSNL network were -- www.fmc.com, www.railnet.com and www.ieg.com.
In the first half of 2006, web servers running on Windows were highly exploited.
Government officials say most defacements result from hackers using pre-fabricated exploits to gain administrative control of the target system and then replacing the web pages hosted on the system with their own systems.
On rare occasions, attackers may not have had an opportunity to gain any user-level privileges on the target server but were able to take advantage of poorly written web scripts or vulnerability of web servers to carry out the defacement.
Source : DNA