The hacked site of State Health Society, Bihar

A hacked hyperlink to a key department has come as a shock to thousands of visitors to the state government website, www.gov.bih.nic.in.

Incidentally, the hyperlink leading to State Health Society was “discarded” around five years ago but hardly anyone bothered to remove it from a series of links from the government website.

With senior department officials not having much clue about the same, sources said the society had discarded the link (www.shsbihar.org) in 2009 and a new website (www.statehealthsocietybihar.org) is running at present.

“It came to light just today (Tuesday) when we started to receive calls about the same. We checked and found out that some explicit pictures had been put up on the old website, along with text in the Japanese script. We first checked the current website of ours but found it absolutely perfect. Later, the matter was investigated and things came to the fore. The matter is technical and hence necessary steps are being taken,” an official at the State Health Society said.

However, till late on Tuesday evening, the old website link was on the website.

“National Informatics Centre (NIC) is responsible for the websites in Bihar. It is quite possible that the link of the old website has been hacked. The NIC is the implementing agency and the department has intimated them about the problem and they will fix it soon. The whole thing is technical and things are being worked out. The website which has been allegedly hacked, does not belong to the society anymore,” the official added.

NIC, headquartered in New Delhi, provides e-governance support to Union government, state governments, districts among others.

The state witnessed hacking cases earlier also. On February 23 last year, the website of the state tourism department (www.bihar tourism. gov.in) was compromised with the hacker leaving anti India speeches and a masked picture of his on the website.

Police sources had said though that they swung into action immediately and it was only after two hours that the disturbing content could be removed from the website.