Govt websites not 'hacked', glitch due to 'hardware failure': NIC

National Informatics Centre, which hosts government websites including MoD and MHA on Friday clarified that the defence ministry website has not been hacked as reported by media.

Taking to twitter NIC said "the website is down due to some technical issue that occurred around 2.30 pm."

"mod.gov.in is NOT HACKED. There is some technical issue since 2:30PM today. Drupal theme https://www.drupal.org/project/zen framework. The site displayed the default logo," said NIC in a tweet.

NIC also said that website of home ministry has also been taken down for the maintenance work and upgrading the security system.

Government websites, including those of defence and home ministries, have not come under any cyber attack, but suffered a hardware-related glitch, National Cyber Security Coordinator Gulshan Rai said today.

Explaining the outage, he said the websites have been down since afternoon after it was noticed that there was a "storage area networking system" failure.

"The same is being addressed. It is only a hardware failure," Rai, who has been working in the field of cyber security since 1998, said. "There is no hacking or cyber attack," Rai, who heads the cyber security unit, said.

"Nearly a dozen government websites hosted by National Infomatics Centre, including defence, home, department of law and labour, were affected due to the outage. "The hardware is being replaced and they will be up very soon," Rai added.

Earlier, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had tweeted, "Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website (http://mod.nic.in). The website shall be restored shortly. Needless to say, every possible step required to prevent any such eventuality in the future will be taken."

Ministry officials said there were Chinese characters on the website and there were clear indications that Chinese hackers were involved in defacing it.

The website is maintained by the National Informatics Centre, an entity which works under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

MHA website taken down

In the wake of the hacking of the Defence Ministry site,the website of the home ministry has been temporarily taken down as part of extra precautions.

An official spokesperson said the National Informatics Centre, which hosts the MHA site, is upgrading the security system of the website leading to its temporary suspension.