7 months ago
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Websites of the Cyberabad and Rachakonda Police Commissionerates were taken offline aft they began redirecting users to gaming pages. Senior constabulary officials confirmed to The Hindu that the contented was archetypal detected by the department’s IT cell, which noticed that visitors attempting to entree the sites were being redirected to outer gaming/betting links.
The Cyberabad and Rachakonda sites began malfunctioning astir a week ago. Citizens seeking constabulary presumption contacts oregon different nationalist services were met with repeated “site can’t beryllium reached” and “destination not reachable” errors, indicating gateway failures.
Following the discovery, the IT compartment approached a Delhi-based cyber information steadfast moving nether NIC’s supervision to place and hole vulnerabilities. Officials said some constabulary sites are expected to beryllium restored successful the coming days.
Cyberabad constabulary officials said the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which hosts the constabulary websites on with respective different authorities portals, had “immediately taken up restoration work”.
“NIC is presently moving connected the backend and the sites should beryllium backmost wrong a time oregon two,” said Cyberabad Cyber Crimes DCP YVS Sudheendra, adding that determination was nary grounds truthful acold of immoderate information compromise. Cyberabad Police Commissioner Avinash Mohanty said that NIC had been investigating the pages and expected them to spell unrecorded by Thursday evening.
The disruption comes days aft the Telangana High Court’s website was breached. Staff astatine the tribunal discovered connected November 11 that respective PDF documents connected the portal, tshc.gov.in, had been tampered with and were redirecting to a gaming tract called BDG SLOT. High Court Registrar (IT), T. Venkateswara Rao, alerted the Director-General of Police and filed a ailment with the Hyderabad cyber transgression police. The website, besides hosted by NIC, carries important judicial information, including origin lists and lawsuit presumption updates.
In fact, successful June 2024, the Telangana Police’s authoritative website and associated Commissionerate portals were unopen down for attraction aft aggregate data-breaches and hacks affecting interior constabulary apps and systems. At that time, the cyber information helping conducted vulnerability assessments and penetration tests crossed each interior and public-facing platforms to plug information gaps earlier restoring service.
Rachakonda Cyber Crimes DCP, B. Anuradha, said the sites were deliberately taken down by the constabulary “for upgradation pursuing NIC’s advice”, adding that the process mightiness instrumentality astir 10 days.
