Surgical strikes: Pakistani hackers attack over 7,000 Indian websites

Over 7,000 Indian websites have been attacked, claim Pakistan-based hackers. The cyber attacks were carried out in retaliation to the surgical strikes by India.

A group of Pakistani hackers have claimed that they have hacked over 7,000 Indian websites in response to the surgical strikes carried out by the Indian armed forces.

The Indian commandos conducted surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir on September 29 to take out terror camps that were planning to send out recruits to India.

Most of the websites attacked by the Pakistani hackers are non-governmental websites.

A Pakistani hacker, who goes by the screen name of Faisal 1337 posted a message on one of the hacked websites: 

You [m@#$%%$@##$%%%^] kill innocent people in kashmir and call your self defenders or your country 
You little b***** violate the cease fire on border and call it "Surgical Strikes" Now kiss the burn of Cyber War

In the background as one enters the hacked website, a Pakistani army song "Aae watan teraa eshara aagaya, aur sipahee ko puukarr aagaya..." (Oh nation, we've received your signal, every soldier has got his call(ing)..." begins to play. 

Indian cyber experts but have called the Pakistani hackers rookies. "I've seen their post. They are not even proper hackers. They are what we call script kiddies, people who use existing computer scripts to hack into computers as they lack the expertise to write their own," Mirza Faizan Asad, legal head, Global Cyber Security Response Team told Times of India.

Asad but emphasised that the cyber threat was real, and if such rookies can cause so much damage, what can the well-trained ones do?

Back in May, the group has brought down the website of the Indian Railway (http://www.indianrailways.gov.in) and defaced the Assam government's official page (http://www.iwt.assam.gov.in/). Two months before that it had taken down a website belonging to the BJP (http://bjpsyc.in/).

In June, the group even attacked the website of the Karnataka police. Two months later, they attacked Canara Bank’s website and injected a malicious page on the e-payment services of the bank in an attempt to block it and gather information.

However, the Reserve Bank of India soon got involved and asked Canara Bank to review the funds in foreign accounts and recheck all balances.