New Delhi, April 6: The official website of Ministry of Defence of India, mod.gov.in  was hacked on Friday. Later, Law ministry, Labour and Home Ministry websites were also found to be hacked and down. As per reports by ANI, Chinese characters appeared on the website home page. On visiting the website, it displayed an 'error' message and asked users to 'try again later'. As per reports, the National Informatic Centre to probe the issue.

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman took to Twitter to inform that "appropriate action" had been initiated in the matter.

Issue with the MoD website ( https://t.co/JJawys4yoB ) has been taken note of. Appropriate action has been initiated. @nsitharaman

— Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) April 6, 2018

The website of Law Ministry and Home Ministry has also been hacked:

"ministry of defence" @rsprasad Law min website cannot be reached. It says website encountered an unexpected error. pic.twitter.com/756bfDYPwI

— Anshul (@chauhanshul) April 6, 2018

The Law ministry website - lawmin.gov.in, Labour Ministry labour.gov.in and Home Ministry website - mha.gov.in were also found to be affected by the hack as both the sites were down at the time of reporting -

This is not the first time that hackers have targeted official websites of the Indian government. Last year, authorities had temporarily taken down the Ministry of Home Affairs website after a cyber attack was reported.

In the last month, the Parliament was informed that over 22,000 Indian websites, including 114 government portals were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018.

Ministry of Defence website hacked, Chinese characters appearing on the website home page. pic.twitter.com/VBzWXLC8EM

— ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2018

Minister of state for electronics and IT K.J. Alphons said in a written reply to Lok Sabha, “As per information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total of 22,207 Indian websites including 114 government websites were hacked during April 2017 to January 2018. A total number of 493 affected websites were used for malware propagation".

According to information reported to and tracked by National Informatics Centre (NIC), a total number of 74 and six government websites hosted on NICNET were hacked during 2017 and 2018 (till February), respectively, the Minister had said.

The Minister informed the Parliament that 301 security alerts regarding potential vulnerabilities and threats to multiple systems and applications were issued by CERT-In during April 2017-January 2018. In addition, various tailored alerts were sent to key organisations to enable them to detect and prevent cyber attacks.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 06, 2018 04:55 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).