Four days after being hacked, the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (www.bjp.org) website remains down, with a message that says that the site is under maintenance and “will be back online shortly”. The BJP hasn’t made a statement on the hack as yet.

The site was hacked on the morning of Tuesday, March 5, and defaced. Screenshots of the defaced site were circulating on Twitter:

A day after the site was hacked, the site displayed a message saying that it is under maintenance and would be back online shortly. As of last evening, March 7, the website was still under maintenance:

Previous hacks and security issues

About two weeks ago, the personal website of Gujarat BJP vice-president IK Jadeja was hacked and defaced with a “Pakistan Zindabad” message. In April 2018, multiple union government websites, including of the Defence Ministry, crashed simultaneously. The MoD’s website was defaced by suspected Chinese hackers; the National Informatics Centre denied that the website was hacked, and that it was “some technical issue.”

The website of the Ministry of Home Affairs was taken down as a security measure. Websites of the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Ministry of Labour & Employment and the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports also showed error messages.

BJP tweet document could be edited

Last month, AltNews founder Pratik Sinha was able to get hold of a Google document of the BJP IT Cell loaded with pre-written tweets for social media accounts of BJP workers and leaders.

Sinha edited the document and changed key words in the tweets. For instance, he changed the phrase “PM Modi took care of the marginalised section” to “PM Modi took care of the richest sections.” The edited tweets were sent out through the official handles of a Union Minister, and the BJP Assam unit, among others.