Supreme Court’s official website hacked by suspected Brazilian hackers
The Supreme Court’s website was hacked earlier today
The official website of the Supreme Court of India (supremecourtofindia.nic.in) was hacked on Thursday, hours after the apex court dismissed petitions seeking an independent probe into Justice Loya’s death.
The top court officials confirmed that the website had become “non-functional” from 11.35 am and said all efforts were being made to restore normalcy.
One of the screenshots of the court’s website, which is also being widely circulated on social media, showed signs of being hacked by a group of Brazilian hackers.
The website’s actual content was replaced by an image of cannabis leaves, with a message saying “hackeado por HighTech Brazil HacTeam”.
A few hours later, the message was removed and the site was put under maintenance by officials from the information technology department. The website is still under maintenance as of publishing this report.
The site was still under maintenance as of publishing this report
The officials, who requested anonymity, were non-committal on confirming whether the website has been hacked and said that the top court’s IT department was in touch with the NIC and the site would be restored soon.
The officials did not confirm if the site was indeed hacked, saying that they were not authorised to speak on the issue. They too stated that efforts to restore the site were underway.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeITY), however, acknowledged that the website was indeed hacked.
The incident comes days after websites of India’s Defence, Home and Law Ministry were brought down in a suspected cyber attack. However, National Informatics Centre (NIC) officials later attributed this to a “technical configuration issue”.
Meanwhile, NIC, which is responsible for maintaining all government websites, has been asked to conduct an inquiry into the hack.
Earlier today, the court ruled that there will not be an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya, who died while hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, in which BJP president Amit Shah was an accused.
