‘Planned attack on Tata Indicom website’

The official website of telecom giant Tata Indicom was hacked on Thursday evening. Immediately thereafter, www.tataindicom.com became inaccessible and it was brought down for repair.   

The hackers, who identified themselves as ‘Anarchy cr3w — Kurdish hackers’ had put a disfigured Tricolour with a golden star in its centre on the homepage. They also uploaded some text in a foreign language. 

Experts suspect it was a planned attack by which the hackers wanted to get access to the user database of Tata Indicom, which is also an internet service provider. 

On Sunday, after the attack at Jama Masjid in Delhi, a news channel received a threat email, reportedly sent by banned terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM). It mentioned that an attack would be carried out in Mumbai. This email was traced to a server in the city.

A mobile internet service, Tata Docomo, was used to send the email and the mobile number was procured by providing fake documents of the person. 

Though the police have questioned the shop owner from where the number was procured, it has not been of much help to investigators.  

Kurdish people are mostly found in parts of Iran and Iraq. When contacted, officials from the Mumbai Cyber Crime cell said they had no idea about the attack. 

A Tata Indicom official said: “On Thursday evening, while routine updation and integration activities were being carried out, which leads to disabling of several security features, the Tata Indicom website was hacked by unknown miscreants. However, our web team quickly regained control and the site was up and running normally in under twenty-nine minutes. We have since put in additional security measures in place to ensure this does not happen again.”

Technology expert Vijay Mukhi said, “If an official website of an internet service provider can be attacked and the security is not up to date to tackle such problems, it might be very dangerous. There are lakhs of people who are on the user database of the company and if the attackers could upload pictures and text on the homepage, then also it is very much possible that they could get get access to the databse. This could be misused.” 

The site which is said to have one of the best security set-up in place was attacked in a very short span of time on Thursday evening when the firewall and other protection was disabled. It is suspected that the hackers had some idea about the updation timing of the website and had waited for the security measures to be disabled, so that they could launch an attack.