‘MoD website down due to cyber outage, not hacking’

New Delhi: The display logo that appeared on the Ministry of Defence’s website after it crashed on Friday was a Japanese character and not Chinese, National Cyber Security coordinator Gulshan Rai said.

The appearance of the logo had led to speculation that MoD’s website and nine other government sites had been hacked by the Chinese. The fears were compounded by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s tweet that action had been initiated after “the hacking of MoD website.” She later posted a press release issued by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that the website was not hacked but it became inaccessible due to a technical fault.

Explaining the cyber outage, Mr. Rai told The Hindu that MoD was running on Drupal, content management software, and that when there was a “hardware failure,” the software went back to resetting position thus displaying the logo, which is a Japanese character.

He said MoD was using Drupal as it was “rich and good.” Drupal, an open source platform, has the Japanese character as the company's logo

“The hardware storage area network which stores the data had a problem, the software (Drupal) went back to resetting position and that is why the logo appeared on the website. The logo was not Chinese but a Japanese character. Its an open source software. The other nine websites were also impacted as all of them were stored in the same system. It was purely a cyber outage,” Mr. Rai said.

Another official said the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which hosts the government websites, was examining the cause of the “hardware failure” and were taking corrective measures.

The official said they were not aware about Ms. Sitharaman’s tweet but added that the concerned ministries could not have been informed in advance as it was a “hardware failure.”

The MoD website was one of the first government websites to go down on Friday. Later, websites of the ministries of home, law and labour and six other departments were also down. They were restored by Friday night.

A private IT professional said hardware failure could be due to multiple reasons such as power failure or backup not working. “Any change to be made on MoD website has to be done through Drupal and its not an alarming situation. Seems to be a one time glitch,” he said.