The college authorities tried to revive the website several times during the course of the last week.
Chennai: The website of DG Vaishnav College in Chennai, which had thousands of hits during the current admissionseason, was hacked last week. A group from Turkey claimed responsibility by flashing its flag and a message.The college authorities tried to revive the website several times during the course of the last week. The site was, however, hacked each time within hours of its revival.
The site’s home page displaying the message from the group called redturk.org. “Everyone will know the power of Turkish and Islam – How happy is the one who says I am Turkish - I think dear admin, you must close this site because this is fun-Hacked again/redturk.org”. It also displays the flag of redturk.org and of Turkey.
“First, we thought someone is doing it for fun. After the failure of our repeated attempts now we have complained to the city police,” said M.Venkatraman, principal, DG Vaishnav college, Arumbakkam, Chennai.
The institution does not have any sensitive information on its website. “We only hosted details about the admissions and courses and achievements of our students in the site,” he said. The college has placed a request with the internet service provider for the IP address to know where the site was hacked.
“Our college website had received more than 23,000 hits during the admission season. So, it might have attracted the hacker group to the site,” another professor from the college said. “This year the entire admission process from the issuance of applications to admission was conducted online. The cyber attack took place only after the admission process got over and so it did not affect us much,” he added.
B.Muthukumaran, a cyber expert and general manager, ITMR, Chennai said the attackers have used the mass defacement tools to hack the website. “The attack might be retaliation for attacks by Indian hackers or they just intended to show their technical prowess or they just did it for fun,” he said. He urges institutions to use more secure programmes for their websites and also to maintain their website domains professionally.
Cyber advocate V.Rajendran termed the hacking a very serious offence. “It should be treated as a criminal case. He said in most cases the IP addresses will emerge either from African nations or Muslim countries. In some cases, disgruntled students were behind such attacks,” he said.
