Over 700 Indian govt websites have been hacked since 2012

Over 700 government websites that are hosted under 'gov.in' and 'nic.in' domains have been hacked by cyber criminals since 2012.

These websites host information for public dissemination and no sensitive information is hosted on such portals," Communication and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told Lok Sabha in a written reply.

"As per the guidelines of the government, the computer systems with sensitive information are isolated from Internet," he added.

"As per information reported to and tracked by CERT-In, a total of 371, 189, 155 and 13 government websites hosted under 'gov.in' and 'nic.in' domains were hacked by various hacker groups during the year 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 (January), respectively," Prasad said.

According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) data, this includes 252, 135, 92 and six websites of state governments hosted on 'gov.in' and 'nic.in' in the year 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 (January), he added.

"The website owners of all hacked websites were informed by CERT-In to immediately remove the hacked pages from the web servers and conduct a thorough security audit of the hacked websites and associated IT infrastructure to identify and address the vulnerabilities to secure the websites to avoid such kind of incidents," Prasad said.