300 state govt sites insecure: IT experts

Government officials confirmed this when contacted by DTNext. The list includes the website of Tamil Nadu government, www.tn.gov.in, the state transport corporation www.tnstc.in, state electricity department www.tangedco.gov.in and so on.

In all these websites, sensitive information can easily be hacked. For instance, in the websites of State Transport Corporation and Tangedco, financial transactions are made through cards and the information can easily be hacked. Apart from that, personal information of individuals such as residential address, mobile numbers, Aadhaar card numbers and so on are also stored in the websites and they too are at risk of being hacked.

Moreover, these sites have been hacked in the past. Some of the known hackings were on October 20,2016, where www.tn.gov.in was hacked and on August 19,2017, the website of Tiruchy Municipal Corporation was hacked by people suspected to be from Pakistan.

Ethical hackers say all websites need to be safe and people should ensure the safety of the websites before logging in. An ethical hacker, Ramji, told DTNext, when people log into a website, they must check the address box, on top of the screen where safety details are listed. 

“The address box will have hypertext transfer protocol secure (https which means that the website is secure, but most government websites do not have https but only http. The ‘s’ in https stands for secure and encrypted transactions, which can only be read by the website and not by any intermediaries,” said Ramji.

An expert on cyber analysis, Vinod Kumar Arumugam, told DTNext that maintaining a secure website is not a herculean task and it takes only a few thousands to maintain one. “For instance, if a hacker hacks into the website of school education department information of all the SSLC students can be stolen and sold to private schools. We may not even know when such things happen as there is no proper security mechanism to monitor it,” said Vinod.

Santhosh Babu, Secretary, Information Technology department, said recently, websites of all 32 districts administrations were made secure and now the process of securing all the 300 plus state government websites is under way.

He also said that Rs 23 crore had been allotted by TN for upgrading the safety of the websites and a team of technical experts were roped in. “All the State’s websites will be made secure in another two or three months,” said Babu.