Ministry of Defence websites goes down, officials cite glitch

According to the NIC official, the websites’ servers were unable to establish contact with the back-end storage, which “went into their default framework”

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Chinese characters were appearing on the website mod.gov.in home page.

Websites of the home ministry, defence ministry, law ministry and labour ministry went down on Friday afternoon, raising concerns about a possible cyber attack. However, senior officials at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) — the body responsible for websites and network services to all government bodies across the country — and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team denied any fears of the websites being hacked as part of a cyber attack. Instead, they said, it was due to a technical configuration issue that the websites had to be taken down.

National Cyber Security Coordinator at the PMO Gulshan Rai told The Indian Express that about 10 websites of various government bodies, “which are serviced by the storage network system”, had been affected. “The storage system had developed a hardware failure because of which the websites are down, and it is being restored,” Rai said. Ruling out any possibility of a hacking or cyber attack or Chinese Trojan, Rai said the websites would be back “very soon”.

A senior official at the NIC admitted “yes, there is a technical issue”, but emphasised that “contrary” to what was being reported, “it was definitely not a hack”. The issues, the official said, were being sorted out, which was why the websites had been down entire late afternoon. The official, however, only spoke about the websites of the ministries of defence, home, law and labour being “compromised” or “displaying the wrong logo”.

According to the NIC official, the websites’ servers were unable to establish contact with the back-end storage, which “went into their default framework”. Usually the websites carry the national emblem of India, the Lion Capital from Ashoka’s pillar, at the top. However, due to the technical issue, the logo of the default framework —- the Drupal framework —- became visible, which the official said was a mix of Chinese and Japanese characters. This was “because of a configuration oversight”, he explained. Drupal is an international web content management platform.
“Generally when you configure a framework, you put an Ashoka (national emblem) in all the websites. Because this was an oversight, the default logo of the Drupal framework became visible.”

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