Over 270 government websites have been hacked by cyber criminals between January and July this year.

As per information tracked and made available to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 201, 303, 308 and 273 government websites were hacked during the year 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 (till July) respectively, an official statement on Tuesday said.

Based on the threat assessment, CERT-In regularly issues alerts for internet users and operators on vulnerabilities.

Five alerts were issued during May and June, 2012 to prominent organisations in the government and private sector about targetting websites for carrying out cyber attacks by the hacker groups, the statement said.

CERT-In also issued advisory providing counter measures to safeguard the websites and network infrastructure against such attacks, it added.

All the organisations were advised to report such incidents to CERT-In along with network logs and relevant data for analysis.

National Informatics Centre (NIC), which hosts a majority of government websites, has deployed state-of-the-art technology solutions including firewalls and intrusion prevention systems.

NIC performs periodic security audits of their network infrastructure followed by subsequent hardenings, besides round-the-clock monitoring of security events for taking remedial measures against cyber attacks, the statement quoted Minister of State for Communications and IT Sachin Pilot as saying.

It added that CERT-In is keeping a close watch on the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks through active co-operation with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country.

Security awareness training programmes on 'Security measures against DDoS attacks' are also organised by CERT-In for the network administrators in the government and private sector organisations, it added.