Close on the heels of China and Pakistan persistently hacking Central Government and corporate websites, Bangladeshi hackers have joined the club through cyber attacks on India — targeting the Border Security Force (BSF) in particular against which it carries a grouse for perceived atrocities on Bangla nationals.

The Bangladeshi hackers said their action was in response to the alleged killings by BSF on the border between the two countries.

The Bangladeshi hackers group identifying itself as Black HAT Hackers claimed to have hacked thousands of Indian websites in retaliation to the cyber attacks by the Indian Cyber Army and Indishell which have hacked over 400 Bangladeshi websites. The Black HAT Hackers also claimed to have opposition to the Tapaimukh Dam.

Last week, Indian Cyber Army and Indishell had attacked the websites of five Ministries in Bangladesh and that of a trade organisation there.

“On February 13, NIC identified some malicious Internet packets in their web servers’ traffic. As a precautionary measure, they blocked many of the Government websites for external traffic as per security drill. No penetration/website defacing could take place,” the BSF said in a statement.

NIC after completing the security audit of these websites (including BSF website) have also opened this for external traffic. “The claim regarding hacking of BSF website is baseless and malicious,” the BSF added.

BSF official website http://bsf.nic.in is hosted in National Informatics Centre (NIC) servers, where most of the Governmentt websites are hosted. NIC is responsible for the maintenance and security of the websites hosted on their servers. They also conduct routine internet traffic analysis on the websites as a security measure.

China and Pakistan have been carrying out cyber offensives in the past and the Indian hackers have also been retaliating to such attacks.

Cyber security expert Dhruv Soi said, “With Bangladeshi hackers joining the cyber offensives against India, the Government of India must adopt better mechanisms to safeguard cyber space.”