PSU’s old website hosts dating, porn links

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 2 : If hacked e-mail addresses of officials from DRDO, NDA and Indian missions across the world were not enough to expose the holes in India’s cyber security, there is more. The old web address of the Central Inland Waterways Transport Corporation Ltd (CIWTC) — a Kolkata-based PSU under the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways — has been hosting a Russian site with elaborate pornographic links for over a month now.

Although the domain name expired in June last year, the CIWTC only launched its new website, www.ciwtcltd.com, recently after it found out about the pornographic links. The old site, www.ciwtc.com, is still there and still has those links.

The PSU has now filed complaints with the police and cautioned National Informatics Centre (NIC). “The website (www.ciwtc.com) was not really hacked but taken over by a Russian company as our domain name had expired. We learnt of some pornographic links displayed on the website and told National Informatics Centre, which blocked the links. So no damage has been done,” said Praful Tayal, CMD of CIWTC.

The Russian www.ciwtc.com lists several pornographic links with the catchline “What you need, when you need it”. On its home page, the site has links under the heads “Hot” and “Popular”. While “Christian Singles” and “Russian Girl” are listed as hot links, “Training in Shalimar Shipyard” and “Old Ladies” are among popular search words.

CIWTC says it has informed the international Internet protocol body — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the agency responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. “We lodged a police complaint a week back and informed the cyber crime cell. We also recently put out advertisements, informing the public of the change in our web address,” Tayal said.

So why did the CIWTC react so late after its URL expired in June 2006? The only IT personnel there took voluntary retirement last year. After he left, no one bothered to check when and how the domain name was taken over by the Russian dating site.

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