LAHORE- The official website of Punjab government remained inaccessible on several occasions in the last couple of months, primarily due to constant hacking attempts by Indian miscreants amid rising cyber war between the neighbouring India and Pakistan.

“We are facing frequent at-tacks from the Indian hackers over the recent past, admitted a senior official of the Punjab Information Technology Department here on April 21, 2003. The Punjab government site-www.punjab.gov.pk was down on April 20, 2003 till the afternoon of April 21, 2003.

The website also could not be accessed on April 13, 2003 as provincial IT Department, keeping in view the hacking attempts, was in process of changing the host server. In the last three months, the department changed three web servers, in a bid to counter security problems, however, hacking attacks remain a threat.

The official informed that attackers could not succeed in defacing the site or seize the domain though they made it in-accessible for others. “The domain of Punjab government site could not be fully compromised as we take several security measurers,” he said.

“A number of hacking attempts, Punjab government site have been traced to India by the host company but it would be difficult to nail them,” he said adding we can try to counter such attempts with the induction of a vigilant mechanism. That is why, he added, we changed three severs in a very short span of time.

“Hacking will always remain a security threat at cyberworld,” he said adding it is a general phenomenon as computer hacking attacks and other Internet Security breaches grew at an alarming rate in the first quarter of this year. But there are ways for minimizing this menace by strictly following security guidelines.

An IT expert said that hacking, an activity for altering the homepages of companies, groups, organizations, governments etc, is used to refer to operations that exploit computers in ways that are Unusual and illegal, typically with the help of hacking tools.

“Pakistanis are well ahead in this field if we compare Pak-India virtual war, the expert said. Among other hacker groups, GFORCE-Pakistan has been very active and has become one of the best known Hacktivist of the world. He stated that the group alone conducted 189 root / web compromises since July 2000 against the Indian sites.
Source: The Nation
Date:4/22/2003