Worried over Intelligence reports that hackers based in USA, Russia, North Korea, China, Pakistan and Gulf countries may attack the websites of the Election Commission of India (ECI) and State electoral offices during general elections in the country, the security agencies have put a deterrent mechanism in place to counter this. The hackers, according to Intelligence alerts, may try to steal database of the electorates and attempt to derail the entire process of the world’s largest democracy. All eyes are now on the Indian electoral process, easily the most humongous poll exercise as 81.4 crore voters will cast their ballot.
Top sources told The Pioneer that Intelligence agencies have received inputs that hackers overseas may infiltrate the websites of the ECI and State electoral offices during polls. This is a new bogey for Indian cyber experts as hackers from China and Pakistan are always trying to break into Indian websites. There are indications that renegade elements harbouring ill-will towards India may pilfer electoral database and abort the democratic machinery.
To counter the hackers, the ECI is installing firewall to save its database during elections. The database will be preserved at an undisclosed destination to ward off the challenge.
“It was a lesson learnt well during last Delhi Assembly elections. Delhi Election Office has taken adequate measures to secure its official website from hackers. The electoral
body will have a backup of its database and firewall installed by the NIC to stave off Chinese and Pakistani hackers. For Delhi, the
backup plan would be set up in other city so that data is preserved,” said an official on condition of anonymity.
India tops cyber crime hit list
According to a confidential CERT-In report, cyber attacks against Indian websites have increased exponentially in 2013. The report says that 4,191 Indian websites were defaced or hacked into in August, 2,380 in July, 2,858 in June and 1,808 in May this year. An overwhelming percentage of these attacks occurred in the domain, whose servers are in India — 80 per cent in June and over 60 per cent thereafter. The .in domain appears particularly vulnerable to attacks. Of the 2,380 Indian websites that were defaced in July, 1,511 were on .in domain and in June the number stood at 2,296 sites.
A report by the Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis lab revealed that an ongoing hacking attack dubbed Net Traveller has hit hundreds of victims in 40 countries since 2005 or 2004, “with the highest number in Mongolia, India and Russia.”
Hidden Chinese dragon tried to steal data during Assembly polls
Chinese hackers had earlier tried to break into the website of Delhi Electoral Office during Assembly polls last year. The search engine had become unresponsive hours before Delhiites voted to elect the fifth legislative Assembly on December 4. The investigation has revealed that the website of Delhi Election Office was accessed from Noida via Chinese servers. Though the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computers was found to be in Noida, the servers were based in China. The spate of cyber attack was such that the search engine of the website almost stopped functioning. The search engine became unresponsive on the intervening night of December 3 and 4. It could not be restored till the polling came to an end on December 4. According to sources, there were 50,000 hits within two hours and the website became unresponsive. Though the SMS/call centre facility remained untouched and that saved the day for the election office. The matter was brought to the notice of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the Union Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology to look into the issue. Following the attack, the Election Office had called an emergency meet of IT experts on December 3 to assess the cyber attack and its implications. Officials say hackers could not hack the database but they managed to hit the search engine. The investigation by CERT also found that the website was accessed from Noida via Chinese servers. Apparently the hackers had broken into IP addresses of computers in Noida.