india

Updated: Apr 19, 2018 21:49 IST

The website of the Supreme Court of India (supremecourtofindia.nic.in) was inaccessible on Thursday afternoon after it was reportedly hacked 30 minutes after the court delivered the verdict in the BH Loya case.

Officials of Supreme Court’s (SC) registry said the website was pulled down after a hacking attempt was detected. Data was unaffected, they said.

The website was restored at 7 pm but wasn’t fully functional. Website users got a ‘service unavailable’ message after the court had dismissed pleas seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge Loya, who was hearing the alleged Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

Dubai-based cyber security expert Dhruv Soi said a Brazilian hacker group called HighTech took control of the website and put up a banner announcing their name.

“The banner was later taken offline and the website was pushed into the maintenance by its management team,” said Soi. “After hacking the SC website, HighTech group reported the snapshot of the hacked website at “zone-h.org”, a hacked website mirroring portal, which is banned in India.”

Soi said the website’s security and server hosting it should be improved. HighTech in 2013 claimed to have hacked Indian websites by breaching into server of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

Gulshan Rai, national cyber security coordinator in the Prime Minister’s Office, said the SC website was maintained by the court administration while other government sites are hosted on NIC servers.

“As soon the hacking took place, the NIC provided all help to the Supreme Court. We will now work with the Supreme Court to make its site more secure,” said Rai.

A fortnight ago several government websites crashed, leading to speculation that Chinese hackers were behind the attack. Rai had then said the websites went down becasue of hardware failure.

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