Press Release (December 22, 2014) Information regarding the Potential Cyber-Attack on the .GOV.AF Websites During our routine monitoring of the Website and Email Systems of the Afghanistan National Data Center (ANDC), we came across suspicious activity on the 19th Dec 2014. We realized one of the files had been modified, however we couldnt trace right away what file was modified. As we looked into the issue further, we realized on 20th Dec 2014 our CDN (Centralize Data Network) was compromised. The attacker had somehow injected a small script into our JavaScript library which was calling an external script. However, the threat was overcome on the 20th December 2014 within 24 hours with no impact on the websites data at all. Worth mentioning, that the intention of this attack was to use the .GOV.AF websites as proxy for external attacks. We are investigating to find out how the hacker entered the JavaScript library on the ANDC hosted websites. We kept this attack a low profile as the impact was not there on the systems and we overcame that within 24 hours, but since this issues is reported in media through the report by the ThreatConnect, an American Security Firm, we felt the urge to provide the media with the Press Release on behalf of the Ministry of Communications and IT (MCIT) on our findings and also to mention that we were aware of this issue earlier as it had happened. We have to realize that we are going through a Cyber-War-Fare era, and a latest example of such ware fare is the Cyber Attack on the Sony Pictures systems in late November 2014. Despite millions of investments in such those systems yet the hackers managed to target them and damage the operations. In the last 4-5 years, the ANDC has been under various failed attacks and have managed to overcome them without any damage to the systems. We believe, that the linkage of this particular attach on the .GOV.AF websites to China could have a political motive. But this is not yet obvious as we still need to gather loads of data to find out the actual intention behind it. There are daily Hacking attempts on various governmental and/or corporate websites across the world. Thus, it is a global issue and the best we can do is to take affordable measures and minimize the threats. Although no one can completely eliminate the risk of these attacks, all we can do is to strengthen our security to protect ourselves and decrease the effects of such attacks when it happens.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 09:00:51 +0000