A group of anonymous Indian hackers, called 'Hell Shield Hackers', claimed on Saturday to have taken down around 100 Pakistani business websites as a "tribute to Indian jawans" on the occasion of Independence Day.
Injector Devil, one of the hackers, told Hindustan Times, "We belong to Hell Shield Hackers, currently most active ‘black hat’ team in India. We have more than 1000 defaces registered on our team name. Our founder is L@z@rus and other members are psychotic_overloadD, indi-g3@r, Mr.404, poison operator are stated there in the deface page."
The term black hat refers to the hacking of a website with malicious intent, while white hat refers to ethical hacking. In the hacking terminology, defacing means taking down a website.
The hackers posted a message in all the websites asking Pakistani citizens to "be prepared for a full day of website attacks".
According to Injector Devil, Pakistan hackers had hacked many Indian sites on Friday (to mark Pakistan’s Independence Day on August 14) and this was payback.
"We want to pass the message that Pakistan hackers should not attack Indian cyber space without any reason. If they do it, we are ready to defend it. Cyber space needs peace but they keep on violating it. But Pakistan hackers were in full blown war on August 14. So it's a little payback from our side as we always do."
{{/usCountry}}"We want to pass the message that Pakistan hackers should not attack Indian cyber space without any reason. If they do it, we are ready to defend it. Cyber space needs peace but they keep on violating it. But Pakistan hackers were in full blown war on August 14. So it's a little payback from our side as we always do."
{{/usCountry}}Some of the prominent sites that were defaced are:
nationalclubpk.com/rooms
http://www.skillscollege.com.pk/Vijay.html
http://www.paspk.org/root.html
http://www.online-akhbar.com
http://cityelectronics.pk/web/
The entire list of 'hacked' websites was published in Pastebin, a cloud space for storing text information.
While some of the hacked websites have recovered, the others remain defaced.