Ministry of Defence official website hacked; Nirmala Sitharaman says 'action initiated'

The official website of Ministry of Defence website has been hacked on Friday. The website shows Chinese characters on the home page which meant 'meditation'.

The website shows an error message saying,''The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.''

Following the incident, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tweeted,''Issue with the MoD website ( http://mod.nic.in ) has been taken note of. Appropriate action has been initiated.''

Later in the day, the official website of Union Home Ministry was taken down as a precautionary measure in the wake of the hacking of the defence ministry site.

"There is no hacking of any nature anywhere in the Defence Ministry website. There is hardware problem due to which the website is down. It will be up shortly," Gulshan Rai, National Cyber Security Coordinator told NDTV.

"Due to malfunctioning of storage network system, websites of few ministries is down and will be up soon," he added.

Last month, the Indian Army released a video about Chinese hackers and urged citizens to use messaging app WhatsApp safely. The Army had also warned soldiers posted along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) against using a host of apps, including WhatsApp.

More than 700 central and state government agency websites have been hacked in the past 4 years.