Indian government websites hosted ads placed by scammers, redirecting users to online gambling sites.
Scammers have been able to insert advertisements on several Indian government websites that lead users to online gambling sites.
The media discovered about forty “gov.in” website links that connected Indian states like Bihar, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Mizoram, and Telangana to online gambling sites.
The state agencies responsible for property taxes and law enforcement in each state own a portion of these websites. Search engines, such as Google, indexed the fraudulent links, making it simple to locate the advertisements online.
The rerouting websites claim to offer betting on games, including cricket competitions like the Indian Premier League. They advertise themselves as “Asia’s most popular” online betting platform and “the number one online cricket betting app in India.”
It’s unclear how the con artists inserted the advertisements on Indian government websites or how long the links pointed to the online gambling sites.
Early this week, the media identified the issue, alerting India’s Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, to the malfunction and providing URLs to a few affected state government websites.
The Indian cyber agency promptly acknowledged the email, and on Thursday, CERT-In verified that they had escalated the issue.
In an email response, the agency stated, “We have taken up with the concerned authority for appropriate action.” There is no known patch for the vulnerability that allowed backdoor access to state government websites.
In June of last year, a security hole in the government’s web content management system software allowed scammers to post advertisements for hacking services on websites run by the United States government. It looked like some of those advertisements had been up for years online.