India govt Web sites defaced

India's National Informatics Center (NIC) said nine official government Web sites were recently defaced, and disclosed that its servers, which host these sites, face unquantifiable amount of hacking attempts daily.

According to a report by the Times of India on Thursday, the affected Web sites belonged to the Power Ministry, as well as government sites of Maharashtra, Kerala, and Uttarakhand, among others. The attacks was said to have taken place "in the recent past" but no exact dates were given, it noted.

The NIC, which reports to the country's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, went on to add that its servers host government Web sites and face hacking attempts on a daily basis.

"It is not possible to accurately quantify these. The attempts are usually effectively blocked by security controls put in place," the agency stated in the report.

Asked to provide additional information on hacking attempts made on government Web sites over the past decade between 2001 and 2011, the NIC said no such records were available. It added that sources of such attempts were mostly traced through Internet Protocol (IP) numbers, but these numbers may not reflect the correct country since hackers usually attempt to hide the origins of these cyberattacks.