Even after a series of government defacements by Anonymous, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the country’s primary cyber incident response agency, said it is not “disturbed by the hackers’ acts”. Even so, the hacker group trolled and defaced the agency’s website in the morning and claimed it was down for two hours.
A scientist at CERT-In, on condition of anonymity, admitted the site was hit but said it was up again very soon. During the attack on CERT-In, Anonymous tweeted on its Twitter account, “Playing with CERT again.” The hacker outfit has been attacking government websites in the past few weeks protesting against Internet censorship by the government. It defaced 13 Mizoram government websites at one go, apart from defacing two state government websites and many others. The hackers were also tampering with the All India Trinamul Congress website for the past few days with the site fluctuating between being up and down. The hackers, however, have time and again stated that they mean no harm to any organisation but will only deface websites.
B.J. Srinath, senior director at CERT-In, said the agency has not issued any high alerts or raised alarms after the cyber attacks. “We are not disturbed by their acts either,” he said. The scientist, who didn’t want to be named, gave a different version and said the agency wasn’t really concerned because “the hackers didn’t mean any financial damage.” The scientist also admitted that CERT-In was attacked using the Denial of Service method last month. The agency had, earlier, denied the attack.