Over 100 government websites hacked in 3 months: Sachin Pilot

As many as 112 government websites, including those of Planning Commission, the Finance Ministry and various State government agencies, were hit by cyber attacks during a three-month period ending February 2012, reveals minister of state for communications and IT Sachin Pilot in the Lok Sabha.

The minister further revealed that the website of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) was hacked on December 4, 2011 by a hacker group called 'H4tr!ck'. The websites of Finance, Health, Human Resource Development ministries and Planning Commission also suffered the cyber attacks. A number of state government websites, including those of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Sikkim, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat, came under attack.

Pilot also said that the Department of Information Technology and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) are working on upgrading their skills to handle threats from cyber attackers. The agencies are working on upgrading the Firewalls and new filters are being added to keep the hackers at bay.

The minister's revelation has not surprised much as the government sites have been long targeted by the hackers. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) recently disclosed that the government sites were hacked almost 200 times during the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The DRDO also pointed out that more resources were required to control these cyber attacks in near future.

45,000 Facebook logins stolen by worm

NEW DELHI: Users of world's biggest social networking site Facebook face a big risk. According to security firm Seculert, a worm called Ramnit has recently started targeting Facebook accounts with considerable success, and has already stolen over 45,000 Facebook login credentials worldwide.

"Recently, our research lab identified a completely new 'financial' Ramnit variant aimed at stealing Facebook login credentials. Since the Ramnit Facebook C&C (Command & Control servers) URL is visible and accessible, it was fairly straightforward to detect that over 45,000 Facebook login credentials have been stolen worldwide, mostly from users in the United Kingdom and France," says Seculert in a blog post.

The security firm suspects that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims' Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends. In addition, cybercriminals are also believed to take advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks.

Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) described Ramnit, first discovered in April 2010, as "a multi-component malware family which infects Windows executable as well as HTML files", "stealing sensitive information such as stored FTP credentials and browser cookies."

In a report in July 2011, a Symantec report estimated that Ramnit worm variants accounted for 17.3 percent of all new malicious software infections.