Most of the Nepal Government Websites could not be opened on 5th May 2091 on Sunday. When the servers went ‘down’ at once, the civilians looking to take government service of foreign employment, revenue, and passport faced difficulty in operation. The government service based on the online system was completely blocked since more than two thousand government websites were down at once. Research by the National Information Technology Center shows that government websites were attacked by Chinese hackers.
Similarly, Assistant Director of the National Information Technology Center, Ramesh Prasad Pokharel, said that were attempts to attack the government website for the last three days. According to him, due to an ongoing attack, the governmental sites have encountered a problem in its operation. “We tried to stop the attack; however, the attack closed all the government websites at once”, he said, hardware and high-capacity servers have been used as a security system in the data center. Despite this, the attacker was able to send a large quantity of traffic to the website, which resulted in the servers being down. “There was a problem of regular closing of the government website for a few days. On Sunday, from 10:30 am, the government website was closed for almost five hours.
Assistant Director Pokharel said, “Sometimes Facebook servers can face downtime. It is a matter of preparation that this type of risk may come. We are now investigating the problem. In the coming days, we are trying to avoid such attacks. Possibly, this problem is not going to return soon.”
In support of the Korean government, there is a separate data center as a backup in Hetauda. The government is preparing to start the operation in that data center from this month. When Hetauda’s data center starts its operation, an additional option will be ready for such attacks in the future.
A Cyber Security researcher, Sachin Thakuri says government websites use old software applications due to which such a problem arises. He said, “If the server was managed as a backup, the problem would be resolved in a short time.”
Reference: Naya Patrika daily Online