Bhubaneswar, May 10: The e-admissions website of Utkal University was allegedly hacked again this morning, prompting the authorities to go for offline (manual) admissions.

If true, this will be the third hacking of the university's website - www.eadmission.utkaluniversity.ac.in - in the past one month.

The varsity authorities called an emergency meeting today afternoon where it was unanimously decided that they would go for an offline admissions process.

Speaking to newspersons, Utkal University postgraduate council chairman Ranjan Kumar Bal said: "The university has decided to conduct offline admissions this year. Students can procure the form from the concerned departments where these will be made available from today."

Bal, however, refused to admit that the university website was actually hacked this morning. "The website has strong security features. However, there were several attempts to break into the website. But, the hackers failed in their attempts," he said.

Though the university was tight-lipped about the happenings, highly-placed internal sources said that the authorities had decided to conduct a security audit to understand if there were any loopholes in the website's security and management.

The university authorities are also planning to rope in the National Informatics Centre to host and maintain all its websites.

A group of former students of the university, who had earlier been assigned the job of maintaining the website, however, claimed that the website was hacked and many important admission data was stolen.

"The site was hacked by one Ahmed Chaanda, who claims to be a member of Team Pak Cyber Lions," a former student of Utkal University told The Telegraph on conditions of anonymity.

As many as 13, 355 students had already submitted their applications online for admission into various postgraduate programmes of the university. The department has decided to intimate all these students about the new procedure through either email or text messages.

The students will need to submit the filled-in form along with a demand draft for the entrance examination. On submission of the form, they will be issued an admit card instantly.

The last date for accepting application form has been extended to June 7 from May 14. The entrance examinations will be held between June 19 and June 28.

The varsity authorities informed The Telegraph that though the admission process had been made offline, the application form would be uploaded on the website in a PDF format, which could be easily downloaded by applicants.