Hyderabad Water Board website hacked; Redirects to a betting website

We recently saw the Supreme Court of India’s YouTube channel getting hacked and now the hackers are not even sparing the government websites. Recently, while exploring the web, a few fishy links caught our attention that looked dubious from the beginning. So, these pages appear in the Search snippets of Google and they belong to the official Hyderabad Water Board website.

However, once you click on the links, you will be taken to a betting website which is hosted on a completely different URL. And things are not wrong with a single page only, instead, a whole section of the official Hyderabad Water Board Website is doing the same. And this has been witnessed by our team for two consecutive days after which it was sure that something was off with the mentioned government website.

Hyderabad Water Board website partially hacked

All the users who are trying or will access the website via the Google News links will be taken to a betting website that goes by the name betwww20.com. This event and the similar ones that emerged in the past raise some high-level questions on the government-managed websites and the security of the users as well who visit these websites.

The most concerning part about the same is that the website is working just fine when you access it directly. And the issue has been there for more than 24 hours as of now. This clearly means that the authorities themselves are not completely aware of what is happening with the official Hyderabad Water Board website.

Technicalities behind the same

Talking about the technicalities, it is pretty clear that the cyber-attackers found a vulnerable point in the website specifically related to its representation on Google News and now they are exploiting it. After Chrome, we also checked the keywords on which the scam links are triggered on Microsoft Edge but there were no issues.

However, while searching on Chrome and Google News, the malicious links were popping up at the top. Until now, the officials responsible for the security of the website have not announced anything. Expectations are that the government authorities will soon look into the matter and solve the same.