Hackers feast on govt sites
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Just two days later, another hacking group called the Indian Cyber Force leaked information of about 2.7 lakh Bangladeshi citizens from the Cox’s Bazar police’s server.
The Daily Star inspected the leak and found data about those potentially flying in and out of the district.
On March 28, the Khulna Metropolitan Police was attacked by Indian hackers, who leaked what they claimed to be the database credentials of their server.
The same day, another group of hackers released what they claimed to be credentials of mail servers of Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority.
Then on June 20, hackers claimed to possess the data of one lakh people from the Investment Corporation of Bangladesh’s database. They claimed to have gotten 9,000 pages of information, including names, addresses and bank account numbers.
The Daily Star, however, could not get access to the data and independently verify the claim.
On July 3, some hackers captured the Bangladesh Railway online ticket portal in a DDoS attack but no data was reportedly lost.
Such DDoS attacks were leveled against the Bangladesh army and air force websites in recent times, with the former being attacked twice. While no data was reportedly lost, the sites were down for a considerable amount of time.
There was also a concerted effort by Indian hackers to deface educational institute websites with such low-level attacks towards the end of June -- Varendra University being one of the victims.
In their bid to attack educational institutes, they leaked all employee data of a school in Dhaka and the user information of a job-recruiting site.
On June 27, they, however, executed a large data leak when they attacked a third-party educational management system called “Schoobee”, operated by Leotech. The system provides essential services, including attendance monitoring, student information and more, for its client institutes.
Three days prior, they leaked a small amount of employee data of the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases Hospital.
The BGD e-GOV CIRT project director said, “I don’t know why there has been a spike in such attacks, but that is what we are observing.”
While there has been a flurry of activities, the threats lay bare, shows an online service called LeakIX, which indexes security loopholes and open ports in websites and servers across the world.
A search for Bangladesh reveals over 7,000 results, which include major government portals such as the Prime Minister’s Office, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh Data Centre Company, newspaper websites and a host of internet service providers.
The situation had become such that on June 27, the CIRT issued a notice urging the government, military, and financial institutions to remain vigilant and take necessary security measures against potential cyber attacks. It specifically mentioned that various sectors, including government and military entities, critical information infrastructures, law enforcement agencies, banks and NBFIs, pharmaceuticals, retail and industrial organisations, and energy and education sectors could be targeted.
However, such notices often fall onto deaf ears.
Just two days before Biman was attacked by a ransomware, the CIRT had sent a notice on March 14 to let the organisation know it had noticed malware activities at an open back-door in the server. They had been notified of such activities even back in 2022.
The authorities concerned ignored the notice to the point of denying that hackers could hold their data hostage for ransom.
“No data has been stolen,” Biman’s managing director Shafiul Azim had told this newspaper back in March.
(The Daily Star’s Shahriar Rahman and Zarif Faiaz also contributed to this report.)