Ministry of Defense website is speculated to be under a cyber-attack after the website displayed an error message and carried some Chinese characters. The Defense Minister confirmed that the site was hacked and said preventive measures will be taken.

India: The website of Ministry of Defense (MoD) was hacked, and Mandarin characters were appearing on the website’s homepage. The MOD's website (https://mod.gov.in/) cannot be reached as of now. The website has been flashing “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later” message on the home page.

The Defense Minister informed that the website will be restored shortly as immediate action has been taken after the hacking. She further added that every possible step will be taken to prevent any such attacks in the future.

However, this isn't the first-time hackers have breached the government's web security. From April 2017 to January 2018, over 22,000 Indian websites, including 114 government portals were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018.

The Minister of State for Electronics and IT, in a statement to Lok Sabha had written that according to the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), around 22,207 Indian websites including 114 government websites have been hacked during April 2017 to January 2018. A total number of 493 affected websites have been used for malware propagation.

Additionally, according to the information tracked by National Informatics Centre (NIC), a total number of 74 and six government websites hosted on NICNET have been hacked during 2017 and 2018 (till February).

The Ministry of Home Affairs website was also hacked in February 2017. The website, however was immediately blocked by the National Informatics Centre.

According to TechSci Research, Cybersecurity is one of the major concerns in today’s world. The increasing cyber-attacks on the critical infrastructure has risked the worldwide security. The motive behind these attacks could be to gain access for recovering sensitive or financial information related to government defense moves, operational strategies of organizations, banking & financial institutions, stock exchanges, etc. The rising Cyberattacks have propelled the demand for cybersecurity measures globally. Implementation of strict government regulations along with augmented government as well as private sector spending towards ensuring cyber security is the need of the hour. This has fueled the need for advanced security solutions such as Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Unified Threat Management, Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System, Security Information & Event Management. The Cyber Security Market is expected to witness robust growth in the coming years.

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