Some Indian government websites continue to allow fraudulent links to be planted to official domains, even months after TechCrunch reported the issue.
TechCrunch reports that more than 90 “gov.in'' website links related to Indian government departments, including the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Indian Post Office, state governments such as Haryana and Maharashtra, and the Parliament, have been linked online. I discovered that I was being redirected to a site with Gambling and investment fraud. Search engines such as Google index fraudulent links hosted on government sites, increasing the risk that regular internet users will find them.
Some search results show compromised Indian government websites hosting fraudulent sites.
In May, TechCrunch reported that links on about 40 Indian government websites were redirecting to online gambling platforms. India's cyber agency, the Computer Emergency Response Team known as CERT-In, escalated the issue at the time. But it remained unclear whether the government had fixed the underlying flaws that scammers were exploiting to create the links.
Notably, Menlo Ventures' Deedy Das posted on social media platform X this week about the re-emergence of the issue, indicating that the hacked pages were widespread.
Security researcher Bob Diatchenko told TechCrunch that the issue may have resurfaced due to a compromise in the website's content management system (CMS) or server configuration.
“Removing only the symptoms (such as malicious content) without addressing the root cause (such as vulnerabilities or backdoors) may allow attackers to reintroduce the problem,” Diachenko said. It's not a very difficult task, but it does require some downtime and effort. ”
Earlier this week, TechCrunch contacted CERT-In to report some of the affected links. The agency didn't respond to emails, but around the time it went live, the links started showing “page not found” errors.