BJP website goes offline after being defaced

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party's official website was taken offline on Tuesday after it was defaced by hackers, reports suggest. On visiting the ruling party's online portal, an error message was initially shown but the website was later taken offline. Those responsible for the defacement of the website left a meme that poked fun at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, multiple posts on Twitter say.

"We'll be back soon! Sorry for the inconvenience but we're performing some maintenance at the moment. We'll be back online shortly! — Web Admin," reads the message on the BJP's website.

Congress takes a dig at BJP

Divya Spandana, who heads opposition Congress' social media cell, ridiculed the BJP after its website was defaced. "Bhaiya aur Bhehno (brothers and sisters) if you're not looking at the BJP website right now- you're missing out," she wrote on Twitter.

Congress faced similar incident in 2011

Apart from this incident, even Congress' official website was targeted back in 2011. Hackers had used objectionable material to mock then party president Sonia Gandhi's profile page. The cyber attack happened to fall on her 65th birthday.

In fact, even the Supreme Court website had gone down last year after a bench, led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, served a hard-hitting judgement in relation to special CBI Judge BH Loya's death. Loya was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. Sheikh was allegedly killed in a fake encounter in Gujarat in 2005.

The attack on the ruling party's website comes amid cyber attacks on Indian government websites, which have been occurred after last month's Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) soldiers were killed.

More than 90 government websites and critical systems were targeted by hackers from Pakistan soon after the Pulwama suicide strike by a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist, top officials in the security establishment said on condition of anonymity.

"There was an unusual surge of activity, attempts to breach systems," a senior official in the security establishment said.