Causing major embarrassment to the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, hacker group Anonymous hacked the Directorate of Standardisation Testing and Quality Control website on Sunday. The hackers said it was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The site remained unavailable for most of the day. Ironically, STQC provides quality assurance and conformity services in sectors including information security. The group used the term ‘TangoDown’ to describe the outage of the website.
DEIT along with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) are the nodal agencies for cyber security in the country. The attack bears substantial weight considering that the target is the top government authority on cyber security itself. This, however, has not drawn any action from the government. The STQC Directorate officials also remained unavailable for comment. Anonymous also hacked the Nagaland state Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana tenders website. Ironically, security software developer McAfee released a report on Sunday saying India had better computer protection than the US and Japan.