AP government budget website hacked

The hacker created additional pages dz.htm, x.htm to the budget.ap.gov.in website, named himself as BBOY1

PTI | February 17, 2012



Just a day before the budget for 2012-13 financial year was to be presented in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly, an unidentified hacker broke into the official government website budget.ap.gov.in, sending the state administration into a tizzy.

The hacker, apparently from a foreign location, created additional pages dz.htm and x.htm to the budget.ap.gov.in website and named himself as BBOY1, sources in the state Information Technology and Communications Department said.

Besides, 26 other official websites of different state government departments, including the important government orders site goir.ap.gov.in, were also found to be hacked and additional pages dz.htm and x.htm were added to each site, the sources said.

The websites were "temporarily shut down for facilitating incidence response and analysis" but the sites have not been defaced nor was data affected, according to IT&C Department.

What has caused concern in the administration was the fact that the hacker(s) broke into the State Data Centre (SDC) maintained by Wipro at the financial district here. The SDC is monitored by a composite team comprising officials of National Informatics Centre while KPMG is the third party auditor.

"The hacking has happened in three stages: the State Data Centre, the government servers and the websites of different departments like General Administration, Commercial Taxes, Horticulture, Remote and Interior Areas Development, Government Gazettes, etc. The hacking has been done from a foreign location going by the algorithms used," a senior official of IT&C Department told PTI.

As per normal practice, the budget data is uploaded on to the website and stored in a "virtual location" within the same domain hours ahead. Once the budget is presented in the Assembly, the entire content is "migrated" to the actual page for open access.

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