The official website of the Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) – an apex government body that promotes competition and fair trade in the market – was taken down, apparently by a hacker on Saturday.
Officials, however, linked the breakdown to technical problems at the end of host server and ruled out any possibility of hacking.
In what seemed to be an attempt to warn the CCP that the site was unsecured, the hacker, which called itself The Hackers Army (THA), left the following message on the commission’s website: “We love Pakistan. THA disaster breached your security. Admin, make your site secure please!”
An official from the commission denied that the site was hacked. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said the site was down because of technical problems at the end of CCP server. “Our IT team has identified the problem – diversion of links. They are working on it and the site will be restored soon,” he added.
He, however, confirmed that all the data, which is public information, is secured. “There was no confidential data on our website,” he said.
The restoration process was taking time because of the weekend, he said, as all the staff was off and they had to call their IT experts from home to fix the problem.
In case of a data loss, he said, the commission can easily restore it because it has A to Z backup of the entire content.
The CCP was able to remove THA’s message from the home page. Things were under the commission’s control, according to the official. “Our IT staff is able to log in to the official accounts. If the site was hacked, the data would not be under our control – which is not the case,” the official said.
However, it was apparent from a Google search for “Competition Commission of Pakistan” that the site was hacked till the filing of this report. With the exception of home page, all other pages such as ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Site Map’ lead to the same page that displayed THA’s message. The title of page for all the pages read “Hacked by The Hackers Army”.
“Given the title of the page saying hacked by The Hackers Army and the message left on the main page, I can confirm the site was hacked,” said Naveed Seraj, an IT engineer who holds an MA degree in the subject from Hamdard University.
They seem to have broken the bridge between the domain.com and the host server, which is why the home page is appearing blank, Seraj said. “Technically unavailable” would be a proper word for this situation, he said. “If someone hacks my website, I will do the same for protecting the data on my server,” he added.
If they have caught the problem, the host server is safe and it is the domain which has been hacked, Seraj said. In this kind of situation, it may take 24 to 48 hours to restore the website, he added.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 12th, 2012.
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