While India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was taking oath at his swearing-in ceremony in May 2019, a hacker called Shadow Viper bypassed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Delhi website and filled it with photos and recipes of beef instead. You’d think that this experience would be enough to reveal all vulnerabilities of the website, that still doesn’t use the https certification, which aids security. But alas, the hackers have struck again and this time it’s not as light-hearted as how to make beef chilli fry.
The BJP’s Delhi website, a subdomain of its main website that runs on the same server, was hacked again on Saturday, November 2. A group that calls itself _Muhammad Bilal TeAM [PCE] has posted pro-Pakistan, anti-Modi hate messages, most notably asking everyone who was diverted from delhi.bjp.org to a page called delhi.bjp.org/kashmir to remember February 27, with a photoshopped picture of Indian air force pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, to commemorate the day he was captured by Pakistani forces after they shot down his MiG fighter plane. They also put up inflammatory things like “Pakistan and Kashmir Zindabad” and “#ModiKutta”.
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Other messages had threats like “Ghar main ghuss kar marain gy,” (We will invade your homes and beat you up) and “I can lie a lot, can i also get a ‘Vir Chakra’ like Abhinandan?” in an effort to mock him for getting caught by Pakistan.
The hack was first pointed out by cybersecurity researcher Elliot Alderson on Twitter, who revealed that the page, Kashmir.html was created using a service called PasteBin, that lets users make dummy web pages.
Following the recent hack, delhi.bjp.org is now automatically rerouted to its main website bjp.org. Some sources say that this is not the second, but the third time something like this has happened, speculating that during the two-week period in March 2019 when the website claimed to be “under maintenance”, it had actually been hacked and led to a loss of data by the BJP.
Ever since the Modi-led party scrapped Article 370, effectively taking away the special powers given to Kashmir claiming to integrate it into India, tensions between India and its neighbouring country Pakistan have flared up, with a Pakistani minister even threatening to bomb anyone who sides with India over this issue.
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