Hackers Loved Indian Websites in 2006

According to the Department of Information technology, Indian websites have been the most targeted sites, by hackers and miscreants, through 2006. A survey conducted by Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) revealed that till June this year, as many as 39 '.gov.in' sites were defaced, which constituted 15 per cent of the total number of hacked sites in the '.in' domain.

Statistics reveal that 67.5 per cent of the 1,752 Indian websites, that were defaced, were '.com' domain websites and 15.9 per cent were '.in' websites. The first half of 2006 saw 278 '.in' websites being defaced, the majority of which, were commercial websites. This is a huge leap from 2005, when the number of websites that were defaced in the whole year, added up to 373.

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Government officials said that most defacements result from hackers using pre-fabricated exploits to gain administrative control of the target system and then replacing the web pages hosted on the system with their own systems.

At times, when attackers may not have had an opportunity to gain any user-level privileges on the target server, they took advantage of poorly written web scripts or vulnerability of web servers to carry out the defacement.

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