Government website prone to hacking

BHUBANESWAR: The Orissa Government has been warned against cyber attacks on its official websites. The National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), in a letter, to the Information Technology Department of the State has cautioned that the websites of the Government are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks and hence, security measures must be undertaken.SQL injection is a code injection technique which exploits the security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application such as queries.The NTRO, a wing of National Critical Information Infrastructure Centre, stated that the official website http://www.orissa.gov.in/ govtpress/userLogin.htm is prone to such attacks.In fact, the entire back end information is being leaked and the same can be exploited by the hackers to exploit and deface the website.“This vulnerability is giving the administrative access to the malicious users and putting the website at high risk,” NTRO Centre Director Dr SM Bhaskar said.In fact, the official website of the State Government has been, on more than one occasion, been hacked and defaced by the hackers in the past.For this reason, the servers had been changed and the universal resource locater (URL) changed by Orissa Computer Applications Centre (OCAC) which manages the website.The NTRO letter also reminded the State Government of the recent attacks and suggested that the security vulnerability be plugged to avoid an inimical intrusion and defacement attempts.The IT Department, meanwhile, has asked the OCAC to take necessary steps in this connection.