Several govt & college websites among those infected with online betting malware

Prepend to the content

Several websites belonging to government departments, municipal corporations, educational institutions have been infected with malware creating redirect web pages landing on online betting and casino websites.

The infested websites include that of Mira Bhayandar municipal corporation which is on the outskirts of Mumbai, the water supply and sewerage board of Bengaluru BWSSB, research institute ICAR. BWSSB has removed these links now but the Google search results still reflects them.

In one instance a blog titled “Betting Exchange in India” is created on the domain Mizoram.gov.in redirecting to a betting portal. While the redirect is now disabled, the blog is still live at the time of going to press. The backward classes welfare department of West Bengal government is also in the list of impacted websites.

Government and education domains can easily be ranked on search engine result pages and the online betting mafia appears to have exploited this loophole.

Among the educational institutions infested with this malware are XLRI, XLRI (Delhi Campus), NIT Delhi, Flame University Pune, Zoram Medical College Mizoram, Himachal Dental College, University of Burdwan and the list goes on. XLRI and Flame have removed these links at the time of writing this.

Betting and gambling is banned in India and the Indian government has issued multiple advisories against promoting online casino portals. With advertisements on main stream media reducing considerably, betting mafia appears to have resorted to hacking and malware infestation to reach out to users.

As all the websites appear to have infested in same way, experts say this is possibly by exploiting a backdoor on the operating systems common to these websites.

The post Several govt & college websites among those infected with online betting malware appeared first on G2G News.