Pakistan under hacker attack, websites of president, foreign ministry down

Paladin allegedly hacked a few key Pakistan government websites on Tuesday: those of the President and the Foreign Ministry of Pakistan. He is the same hacker who had allegedly taken down two major Taliban websites a few days ago . However, he said the Pakistan hack is a solo operation and not endorsed by his group - GhostSec Hackers. He said his motive for the attack was Pakistan giving backing to Taliban against Afghanistan. He added that the Turkish web hosting service Niobe hosted Taliban websites, and hence he might later hit Niobe and Turkish government websites.  The Pakistan government websites are under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. In a denial of service (DoS) attack, many computers try to access a website simultaneously, thus rendering others unable to access its server. Typically, Trojan malware is used to hijack many computers to deliver the distributed (or spread out) attack. He did a test attack for a short duration on Monday and took down three out of 10 of their government services including http://pakistan.gov.pk before attacking again on Tuesday. Pakistan government servers are hosted in Australia by APNIC. FirstPost asked Paladin, “Are you hitting Pakistan government websites as Shahamat has recently been restored by Taliban?” But Paladin denied that. “No, I did my work. They lost their whole database and got humiliated.” So why has http://pakistan.gov.pk not been hit and only the other two have? According to Paladin, “It’s getting attacked but it’s not offline. At some places it would be. I’m focusing on http://mofa.gov.pk, a main service.” The current availability status of the websites can be checked by visiting https://check-host.net/, entering the website URL and clicking the HTTP button. Screenshots of the attacked websites and their check host status :

According to the hacker, Pakistan government was able to stop the attack on the three websites after more than 12 hours. Late Tuesday night, the hacker shifted the attack to another Pakistan government website, that of its Federal Public Service Commission. That website began working properly on Wednesday. Paladin also claimed to have DDoSed Pakistan Foreign Ministry email login portal to stop them from gaining access to their mails. This story was updated on Wednesday.