[Update] Ministry of Defence Website Not Hacked, Says National Cyber Security Chief

The official website of the Ministry of Defence had not been under any cyber attack but had suffered a hardware-related glitch as per the National Cyber Security Coordinator, Gulshan Rai. He further explained that the websites had been down since Friday afternoon after it was noticed that there was a "storage area networking system" failure. "The same is being addressed. It is only a hardware failure," said Rai.

Earlier, visitors to the Ministry of Defence website were shown an error message stating, “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later". Several reports claimed that the website was hacked by Chinese hackers as it showed a Chinese character which means ‘Zen’ according to Google Translate. Following this, Nirmala Sitharaman, Defence Minister of India had tweeted "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."

"We are seized of the matter. The National Informatics Centre, which maintains the website, is trying to restore it," a spokesperson in the ministry had said as per PTI.

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Last year, Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said in a written reply to Lok Sabha that over 700 websites of various central and state government departments were hacked in the past four years. Of the total of 707, 199 of them were hacked last year, 164 in 2015, 155 in 2014 and 189 in 2013. Rijiju had informed earlier that a total of 8,348 persons were arrested for their involvement in cyber crimes.

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