MPSC Website Defaced

The Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) which selects the best brains from Maharashtra for government jobs had their site defaced on the 18th Sep, 2007. The government of Maharashtra owns the website and hosts a lot of different content on it. Different government documents along with student results for new jobs and job posting are also hosted on this website.

The MPSC website: http://mpsc.maharashtra.gov.in as of writing this post, is not working and was not reachable. Although the clean up work was done(by cleanup I mean, stopping access), it could not escape the hands of Google's cache. The smaller screenshot of the naughty work by the Saudi hackers is below. You can go bonkers by seeing a larger, clearer version from google's cache!!

The Maharashtra Government has recently been pushing a lot of e-governance, which means government officials are asked to leave their big paper books and get on the computer. This has resulted in a large number of people accessing computers for their daily work in government offices. The irony of the matter is that Mumbai, which is the state capital of Maharashtra boasts of having India's very powerful cyber cell, which looks to prevent cyber crime as well as book cyber criminals. But lately it has been only giving directives to cyber cafes how to monitor people on what they are doing!! Basically, they just want to easvesdrop on people's privacy. Instead of doing that, if they would have invested in basics of network security and better safegaurding of government servers, such incidents would not happen.