More than a day after the website re-routing went public, the home page of ISRO's Antrix Corporation was not yet up.
There was no official update or information on what action was being taken.
For those looking for information on antrix.gov.in, the message until 9 p.m. on Monday was, " This site is under construction. Come back soon ."
The “redirecting” of Antrix’s homepage to jdcentwine.org - or American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a large Jewish humanitarian aid body — went public on Sunday afternoon.
According to a couple of sources who spoke about the incident, the Antrix site shows the latest date as 13 July 2015. Before that, it does not appear to have been updated after January 20, 2015 — almost seven months back. One source said he had visited it over five weeks back.
Although ISRO does not call it a hacking act, any unauthorised web entry and changing of its content amounts to it said Mirza Faizan, Co-Founder of the Global Cyber Security Response Team.
“It is a case of what we call ‘ad click fraud’,” Mr. Faizan told The Hindu , stressing that it exposed the online vulnerability of and loopholes in many such sensitive government agencies. Each time a visitor clicks on the website, someone at the other end of redirected site — a common fraud — makes some money.
Sites related to sensitive agencies of the Departments of Space, Defence R&D and Atomic Energy are obvious targets.
The Antrix site was being hosted by an external contractor based in Bengaluru. Interestingly, this host’s site also showed that it was under construction, Mr. Faizan said. Did the compromise happen there?
The obvious question is: Should the hosting of the website of a strategic agency be outsourced?
‘No data loss due to hacking’
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has suffered no information loss due to the hacking of the website of its commercial arm Antrix Corporation, ISRO chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar has said. He told the media here on Monday that the hacking took place when the website was in the process of being shifted to ISRO’s own server.
