Govt Websites Face Major Outage; Hacking Ruled Out

Govt Websites Face Major Outage; Hacking Ruled Out is a The Hindu Business Line article published on 6 April 2018. The report examines a major outage affecting several Indian government websites, including those of the Ministries of Defence, Home Affairs, Law and Labour, and the Central Bureau of Investigation, which temporarily displayed Chinese characters and triggered concerns about a coordinated cyber attack.

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Article Details

📰 Published in:: The Hindu Business Line
📅 Date:: 6 April 2018
📄 Type:: News Report
📰 Newspaper Link:: Read Online

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In a sudden outage on Friday, a few key government websites went down, sending officials into a tizzy as rumours of a widespread hacking of portals created panic across the corridors of power.

The Ministry of Defence website was the first to go down, with Chinese characters being displayed on the portal's homepage. Thereafter, one after another, the websites of the Ministries of Home Affairs, Law and Labour and of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) went down.

All the sites were restored by late evening. Late in the day, the National Informatics Centre confirmed that the sites were not hacked. "The site showed what appeared to be a Chinese character and it was understandable that the site was perceived to be hacked. However, it has since been identified that the sites have not been hacked," an NIC release said.

'Technical snag'

While the IT Ministry tried to downplay the issue and said that the websites had not been hacked, and that it was a "technical snag", Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said she had ordered a probe into the matter, hinting that it may have been a case of hacking.

"Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website (http://mod.nic.in). The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken," Sitharaman said in a tweet.

This is not first time that Indian government websites faced an outage. The government had informed the Lok Sabha earlier this year that over 700 websites linked to the Central and State governments were hacked in the past four years. In February last year, the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs was hacked.

"Compromising a government website is a low-value attack, but results in a big win for the attackers in the battle over perception," Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society told BusinessLine. "This usually happens because the server administrator has not configured the software stack properly or is not installing all the security updates in a timely fashion."

Context and Background

This incident occurred on 6 April 2018, coinciding with the Indian Air Force’s announcement of its largest-ever wargames focusing on dual threats from China and Pakistan. The simultaneous outage of multiple high-profile government websites, particularly displaying what appeared to be Chinese characters (later identified as the Mandarin symbol for “meditation”), triggered immediate speculation about a coordinated cyber attack with potential geopolitical implications.

The contradictory official responses highlighted confusion within the government about the incident’s nature. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s immediate tweet acknowledged “hacking” and promised investigative action, whilst the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the National Informatics Centre maintained it was a technical configuration error rather than a security breach. This discrepancy reflected broader challenges in India’s cybersecurity governance, where responsibility for website security was distributed across multiple agencies without clear incident response protocols.

The incident occurred against a backdrop of persistent vulnerabilities in Indian government digital infrastructure. Parliamentary data revealed that between April 2017 and January 2018, 22,207 Indian websites, including 114 government portals, had been compromised. For 2018 specifically, 15,779 websites were hacked up to November, including 105 government sites. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team had issued 301 security alerts during the April 2017–January 2018 period regarding potential vulnerabilities.

Abraham’s assessment pointed to systemic issues beyond individual incidents. Government websites hosted on NIC infrastructure frequently suffered from inadequate server hardening, delayed security patch deployment, and insufficient configuration auditing. The 2017 Ministry of Home Affairs breach referenced in the article similarly stemmed from preventable misconfigurations rather than sophisticated attack techniques.