Indian Institute of Technology- Madras faced an inconvenient situation as various websites managed by them were hacked anonymously and simultaneously. Apart from the website containing announcements on conferences to be conducted by the institute, six department websites, five center of excellence sites and five other websites have been hacked as well.
The websites that were hacked include http://www.cce.iitm.ac.in; saif.iitm.ac.in and biotech.iitm.ac.in. Thankfully, the main website of the esteemed institution remained safe from coming under these attacks.
Bhaskar Ramamurthy, director of IIT- Madras said,
Some content of the university has been compromised after the websites were hacked”. He also added,”The website containing information about the conferences that will be held at IIT-Madras has been hacked. This is because we have given access to a lot of people to put up content on the website through a password. The password must have been leaked.
Mr Ramamurthy also added that the website had a week security saying that,
It has links to the cultural and technical fests. A lot of faculty members and students have access to this website. We have discussed this in the past, but we cannot help it. If we attempt to make the site more secure, then there will be complaints of delay about updating content on the website.
Meanwhile, IIT-M’s annual cultural fest Saarang is expected to be held between 4th and 8th of January. As a preventive measure after this spate of attacks, IIT-M has decided to delink cultural and technical fest’s websites.
We will have independent websites for cultural and technical fests, and the website for announcements about conferences will not have any information about the institute in the future.
Mr Ramamurthy also added that,”
We are securing the website. It will be cleaned up and will be available for users soon.
The server that managed these websites has been down since the spread of the news.
Six of department’s individual websites have been hacked that include biotechnology, civil engineering, humanities and social sciences, management studies, mathematics and mechanical engineering.
The websites of the Central Library,Central Workshop, Central Electronic Centre, P G Senapathy Centre for Computing Research and Sophisticated Analytical Instrumentation Centre were also reported hacked.
