June 29, 2002	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 17, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, June 28: The website of the government, www.pak.gov.pk, has been blocked by Indian hackers using the elementary Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

The website was inaccessible on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The blockade of government’s official website is the latest in a series of attacks in the ongoing cyber warfare launched by hackers of the countries.

The website is maintained by the information ministry through a local Internet Service Provider, whose service has been classified as “poor” according to latest ISP ratings done by an independent organization.

The report about poor service of the ISP was received by the science and technology ministry on Friday.

“The website is inaccessible because the server of the ISP is down,” director to secretary information’s office, Mr Rasheed said when asked about blockade of the website. “The ISP is trying to change the server,” he said.

Information technology experts in the ministry said the website was choked by DoS attack, launched through the Yaha Worm virus by the Indians.

DoS attacks involve flooding target computers with false requests for information, overloading the machines’ capacity to respond leading to denial of service to legitimate users. Many such attacks use computers spread throughout the world that have been taken over through hacking.

Officials in the science and technology ministry said the information ministry was lacking in technical expertise to protect the website from professional hackers. DoS is one of the most rudimentary methods in cyber war and much more deadly viruses, which can penetrate firewalls, have been developed, officials said.

A better option was to host the website through a third country where the rates are cheaper and the hosts have the responsibility for protecting the website, IT experts said.

The website of the ministry of science and technology, sources said, had been hosted by a third country and it had more advanced methodologies for protection, sources said.

IT experts said the government had no proper security policy for the protection of websites.

When contacted, Information Secretary Anwar Mehmood told Dawn the government was establishing an Internet wing to propose measures for making its websites secure.