Govt websites crash in facepalm moment for Modi’s Digital India

Whichever way the Modi Government explains it—government websites were not hacked, it was just a hardware malfunction—the message is clear that India is not ready yet to follow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s headlong rush towards Digital India.

Clearly even the most secure online properties of the Government are not safe and secure. If the websites of the Ministries of Home, Labour, Law and Defence can crash in an instant, who can guarantee that commercial banks and data vaults will be immune to systems failures or cyber attacks? It proves only one thing—the country’s entire population should not be frog-marched into a cashless economy or be forced to surrender their private and personal data.

Post-mortem reports and investigations by cyber sleuths will undoubtedly come up with explanations about what happened, how it happened, why the system failed and who is responsible. But all that can wait. It really does not make a difference whether the government sites were breached with hostile intent or were crippled by a technical glitch. What matters is the core concern—that even the most carefully guarded official data sites can come crashing down.

Nobody denies that data protection in India remains a grey area. According to security software giant Symantec, India ranks third in the list of countries where the highest number of cyber threats were detected in 2017, and second in terms of targeted attacks.

The irony is that even Gulshan Rai, India’s cyber security chief, candidly admits that frauds in ATMs and credit cards are rampant. He, personally, avoids net-banking transactions because, as he himself openly says, “I understand the issues involved”.

Should a government that can’t protect its own websites, force citizens into making digital transactions?

The common man has only one set of simple questions: Why is digitalisation being thrust upon the nation in such an authoritarian fashion? Why is the Modi government hell-bent on taking one billion citizens virtually by the scruff of the neck and shoving them into the electronic era with such unseemly haste? Why are you so ruthlessly imposing enforced e-transactions, obligatory Aadhaar, mandatory electronic voting and compulsory GST filing?

Especially when you know full well that:

• The bulk of the population is not computer savvy
• Your own state-of-the-art cyber security systems are repeatedly breached
• Even the most advanced nations of the world are vulnerable to hacking attacks
• The entire Internet is awash with malicious bugs and viruses
• Data pirates are prowling the cyber highways with abandon
• Foreign powers with sophisticated surveillance devices are watching your every move; and
• Multinational corporations are stealing and selling private data as part of their business model

It would be naïve to expect any rational answers. It is, however, educative to take a closer look at what happened on the day that several websites of important central ministries crashed.

The frightening truth is that nobody really knows. Hacking of government websites is too complicated for even top bureaucrats to understand, let alone explain to the lay public. Eventually, they do manage to issue a statement in standard bureaucratic language: “The system encountered a technical error. All efforts were made to identify the problem and restore the affected websites at the earliest”. When asked if they could confirm that the websites were hacked, they claimed no hacking has taken place. They said it was a hardware malfunction that caused the sites to go offline temporarily, and that action had been initiated to rectify the error.

Then Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman caused some red faces in officialdom when she impulsively tweeted: “Action is initiated after the hacking of MoD website (http://mod.nic.in ). The website shall be restored shortly”.

Sitharaman had unwittingly admitted that it was a case of hacking—not just a technical glitch. If top bureaucrats do not know what has gone wrong, then how can anyone expect the Ministers to be better informed?

That apart, anyone logging onto the Defence Ministry’s website could have seen a prominent icon in Chinese script. Along with it was an Error Message that read: “This website has encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later”.

Under that was some technical jargon that only computer geeks can comprehend: “PDO Exception. System error: 113. Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet'”.

Requested to decode this in layman’s language, some software engineers provided the following explanations and definitions:

• PDO Exceptions take place when the software that helps to merge databases into a singular package, gets jammed.
• System error 113 simply means there is “no route to the server”.
• When a bug interferes with the software, it blocks access to the databases and connection with the server is lost.

Even after obtaining such dazzlingly clear clarifications, certain basic issues continue to puzzle ordinary citizens.

• If it is so easy for some third party to block access to the databases of even highly protected government websites, then is anything in the digital world safe from interference?
• The Defence Ministry website displayed a Chinese symbol or message—does this not mean that the site was not only blocked but also broken into and extraneous content was loaded on to the Home Page?
• Is this not hacking? If not, please inform the people of the country what the definition of hacking is.
• How was it possible for some third party—whether foreign or domestic, whether with hostile intentions or just for fun—to enter, block and deface the site with unwanted content?
• Is the Government certain that the sites were only blocked and rendered inaccessible for a few hours? Could not the hackers have also taken out data from the Ministry’s databases?
• What about top secret data inside the Defence Ministry, the Home Ministry, the Intelligence Agencies, the financial institutions of the country? Are they also vulnerable to third party intrusion and data theft?

The nation needs answers to these pertinent and worrying questions.