Malayalam movie megastar Mohanlal’s official blog was hacked allegedly by pro-Kashmir separatists on Tuesday morning. The hackers kept an image of Pakistani flag, separatist slogans and threats to the Indian State for about 20 minutes on the site.
The hackers, who called themselves as Team Cyber Warriors, said on the hacked site of Mohanlal, thecompeleteactor.com, that they had done this to put across to the Indian State their messages. They called for free Kashmir, said Muslims were not terrorists and put across a threatening message to the President of India.
“Our target is your Government’s websites. We will Inshaalah with the help of many Muslims take you off the Internet. Your credit cards, your bank accounts and your servers are in danger,” the hackers’ post said. In the post intended for the President, the hackers said India could continue using guns but the guns would fall silent one day.
Security experts said that the hackers could have selected Mohanlal’s blog for hacking perhaps because of his connections with the Indian Army as an honorary lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army. His last post on the blog was a message to Keralites in which he praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his speech on the Teachers’ Day.
Former NSG official Major Ravi, who is also a close associate of Mohanlal in the movie field, confirmed to the media that the site had been hacked. He said preliminary and informal inquiries “at our level” had resulted in the finding that the hacking had originated not in Pakistan as everybody would be tended to believe but in China.
“Since the conversations in the blog mostly used to be in Malayalam language, it is only natural to infer that this hacking had Malayalee connection, a guess which several IT experts refused to agree with. “We have done what we could do, and the Indian Army could be looking into it,” Major Ravi said.
N Vinayakumaran Nair, an official with the Kerala Police’s Cyber Cell, said they had not yet got any complaint from anybody on the incident. He said an inquiry would start immediately after they received a complaint but IT expert Joseph C Mathew said there was no need for a complaint for the police to launch a probe into such a violation.