14 DAY TRIAL // Pakistani Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority's website became the latest victim of a feud between Indian and Pakistani hackers, who after one round of mass defacements on both sides of the border, are not ready to lay down their weapons.
The attacks started two weeks ago on November 26, with a group called the Indian Cyber Army (ICA) defacing over 30 Pakistani government sites as a “homage to the martyrs of the terror attacks.” [a referrence to the 2008 Mumbai attacks orchestrated by Pakistani Islamic terrorists]
Then last Friday, a group of Pakistani hackers identified as Pakistan Cyber Army (PCA) retaliated and defaced over 270 websites belonging to Indian businesses, schools and other organizations.
Among them was the website of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s premier law enforcement agency, which launched a criminal investigation following the incident. Mid Day reports that ICA has now responded to that attack by hacking ogra.org.pk, the website of the Pakistani Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA).
"PCA has done no great job. They attacked very soft targets and such vulnerable websites are floating around all over the web," an Indian hacker told the local newspaper.
He also explained that the CBI hack did not involve root access, a theory supported by the fact that the site’s header and side menu remained visible.
Giving this particularity of the attack, it is indeed much more likely an SQL injection vulnerability was used, rather than hackers gaining complete control over the Web server.
The latter scenario would have been a real problem, because the CBI website is hosted by the National Informatics Centre along with a whooping 30,000 other government websites.
ICA is also said to have hacked the website of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (Party of Holy Warriors), a Kashmiri militant group designated by the Indian government as a terrorist group.
Considering the long-standing feud between hackers in both countries, it’s unlikely that any of them will back off. Things will probably escalate as they try to top each other off by going after more important targets and launching more damaging attacks.