Govt websites under Indian virus attack

By Shahzad Raza

ISLAMABAD: Official websites of the Government of Pakistan are under attack of a new virus believed written by a notorious group of Indian hackers.

Internet security experts told Daily Times that the websites with gov.pk tags were under attack of X-series of Yaha virus that was written by an Indian group that calls itself “Indian Snakes”.

Although there is no solid evidence but it is believed that the group of hackers is being backed by fundamentalist Hindu organisations. The Yaha series virus had been attacking websites including government sites, Internet Service Providers (ISP) and stock exchanges.

Awais Leghari, the Minister for Information Technology, confirmed that the Pakistani websites were under severe attack of the Yaha virus. “We are reviewing this problem and we will come up with a proper policy in the next couple of days.”

He said that after the complete review the ministry would decide whether to host all the website at one server outside Pakistan or to different servers. He held the previous policymakers responsible for the current crises being confronted by the country.

Muhammad Khizer Aziz, the President of Islamabad.net, said: “This time the virus was launched seeking more damage to the official websites of Pakistan. This DDOS-cum-DNS attack will eat the bandwidth at ISP level making the websites unavailable to the visitors.”

He added that the launch of Distributor Denial of Service (DDOS) attack overloads the server by multiple requests. He expressed his dissatisfaction over government policies to effectively deal with that serious issue. He said that the self-claimed IT experts in the ministry were suggesting shifting the server of the official websites to the United States, which reflect their inability to counter Indian attack.

When the same point was put before the minister, he said: “We are suffering due to the wrong policies of the former governments. At this time we will continue to suffer if we don’t take a short-term decision. After securing our websites and restore free inflow of traffic, we will be able to develop some long-term policies,” he added.

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