Ministry says hacker attack detected

KABUL National Data Centre (ANDC).

“We came across suspicious activity on last Friday. We realised one of the files had been modified, however we couldn’t trace right away what file was modified,” the MCIT said in a statement.

The ministry looked into the issue and found on Saturday that its CDN was compromised. The attacker had somehow injected a small script into its JavaScript library which was calling an external script. The threat was overcome on within 24 hours with no impact on the data.

The statement said that the intention of this attack was to use the .GOV.AF websites as proxy for external attacks. “We are investigating to find out how the hacker entered the JavaScript library on the ANDC hosted websites. We kept this attack a low profile as the impact was not there on the systems. But since this issue is reported in media through the report by the ThreatConnect, an American Security Firm, we felt the urge to update media on behalf of MCIT on our findings and also to mention that we were aware of this issue earlier as it had happened”.

The statement said that the MCIT had to realize that “we are going through a Cyber-War-Fare era, and a latest example of such ware fare is the Cyber Attack on the Sony Pictures systems in late November 2014. Despite millions of investments in such those systems yet the hackers managed to target them and damage the operations.

In the last 4-5 years, the ANDC has been under various failed attacks and have managed to overcome them without any damage to the systems, it added.

“We believe that the linkage of this particular attack on the .GOV.AF websites to China could have a political motive. But this is not yet obvious as we still need to gather loads of data to find out the actual intention behind it,” it noted.

It said that there were daily hacking attempts on various governmental and/or corporate websites across the world and the MCIT was taking affordable measures to minimize the threats.

pr/rm

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