Singha Durbar Server Continues To Face Cyberattacks

Jan 30, Kathmandu:  The website of the Government of Nepal, which is hosted at the National Information Technology Center, is still not fully operational. On Saturday, all government websites were down due to a cyber attack from multiple sites at once. About three hours after the down, the website is back in operation, but all the sites are still not able to open properly.

Websites are still being attacked. "Websites are still being attacked," says Ramesh Pokharel, the information officer of the center, "compared to yesterday, the attacks are less today. But there is still a problem when opening some websites."

He said that the site was down due to a cyber attack because there was no engineer in the office yesterday and Saturday and it will take time to get it operational. "On Saturday, our balance was broken," he says, "Yesterday was also off. Even though there were few engineers. The manpower was reduced due to attacks from different sites.

Today, everyone is there. They are monitoring everything everywhere. So there should not be any problem." According to Pokharel, the problem is being solved gradually, but the Internet users of Worldlink are still not able to access government websites. Unal said that necessary coordination is also being done for that.

According to him, a cyber attack of this nature happened 5/6 years ago. "Anyone wants to attack the government. There is a kind of illusion among people that if they attack government websites, they will become popular," he adds, "and this is why more attacks are made on government websites."

He said that alternative measures are being worked on to prevent such problems from recurring. He informed me that he is looking for an alternative to such cyber attacks, especially during data migration.