A.Rafay
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KARACHI: The Election Commission of Pakistans website was reportedly attacked by an Indian hacker on Friday. The website is currently down.
The attacker has defaced the home page and has possibly compromised its availability to visitors, according to a cyber expert.
The cyber attack on ECPs website is being discussed across various internet forums with people complaining about being unable to visit the site. The attack came at a time when the traffic on the website increased ahead of the general elections.
The hacker, who identified himself as NIGh7 F0x, seemed to have hacked the website first then defaced its homepage and eventually compromised its availability, according to Rafay Baloch, a professional white hat the term used for hackers who, against quick paybacks, assist worlds leading websites against possible cyber attacks by exposing their vulnerabilities.
The availability of any site is usually compromised through a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack but this is too early to say if it was one, Baloch said. The other possibility could be the impact of the Spamhaus attack, the largest DDoS attack in the worlds history that has mainly affected North America and Europe and slowed down internet globally.
The Spamhaus attack could also compromise the availability of ECPs website, Baloch said, because its host server is in the US.
The official government sites are at risk of such attacks because their host server PKNIC is vulnerable to basic-level cyber attacks, Baloch added. PKNIC is a shared registry system that manages the .pk domain name space (DNS) for Pakistani websites.
Indian black hats are targeting Pakistani websites almost on a daily basis with the Federal Investigation Agency being aware of the issue, according to Baloch.
Despite being attacked twice this year, PKNIC has not fixed those vulnerabilities, Baloch said.
ECP website defaced by Indian hacker – The Express Tribune
The attacker has defaced the home page and has possibly compromised its availability to visitors, according to a cyber expert.
The cyber attack on ECPs website is being discussed across various internet forums with people complaining about being unable to visit the site. The attack came at a time when the traffic on the website increased ahead of the general elections.
The hacker, who identified himself as NIGh7 F0x, seemed to have hacked the website first then defaced its homepage and eventually compromised its availability, according to Rafay Baloch, a professional white hat the term used for hackers who, against quick paybacks, assist worlds leading websites against possible cyber attacks by exposing their vulnerabilities.
The availability of any site is usually compromised through a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack but this is too early to say if it was one, Baloch said. The other possibility could be the impact of the Spamhaus attack, the largest DDoS attack in the worlds history that has mainly affected North America and Europe and slowed down internet globally.
The Spamhaus attack could also compromise the availability of ECPs website, Baloch said, because its host server is in the US.
The official government sites are at risk of such attacks because their host server PKNIC is vulnerable to basic-level cyber attacks, Baloch added. PKNIC is a shared registry system that manages the .pk domain name space (DNS) for Pakistani websites.
Indian black hats are targeting Pakistani websites almost on a daily basis with the Federal Investigation Agency being aware of the issue, according to Baloch.
Despite being attacked twice this year, PKNIC has not fixed those vulnerabilities, Baloch said.
ECP website defaced by Indian hacker – The Express Tribune
