The Andhra Pradesh government website, which is to host the State Budget -2012-13 to be presented in Assembly today, has been hacked on Thursday. According to sources, hackers broke into a server, maintained by information technology (IT) department, and added pages to websites of 27 government departments, including the crucial budget.ap.gov.in. The hackers, apparently from a foreign location, posted messages in Urdu and English. 

The hacker created additional pages dz.htm and x.htm and named himself as BBOY1, sources in the information technology and communications department said.
The important government orders site goir.ap.gov.in was also hacked and additional pages dz.htm and x.htm were added, the sources said. The websites were "temporarily shut down for facilitating incidence response and analysis" but the sites have not been defaced nor was data affected, the IT&C department said in an official release.

The hacking of the site was discovered by the officials around 11.30 AM and found the additional pages have been added to the site. The main concern for the administration was that the hackers broke intio the State Data Centre (STC) maintained by Wipro. Senior IT officials are of the view hat the hacking has took place in three states, the satate data centre, the government servers and the websites of different departments. The departments which were hacked are general administration, commercial taxes, horticulture, remote and interior areas development, and government gazettes.

Chief secretary Pankaj Dwivedi directed additional director general (CID) SV Ramana Murthy to investigate the crime. The Cyber Crime wing of CID swung into action and began investigation. As per normal practice, the budget data is uploaded on to the website and stored in a 'virtual location' within the same domain hours ahead. Once it is presented in the Assembly, the entire content is 'migrated' to the actual page for open access. Initially, there was fear that the hackers might have accessed the budget report.

Finance department officials, however, maintained that no data related to the 2012-13 budget was uploaded on the website yet. The officials are reluctant to confirm whether any data has been uploaded to the virtual location on the website. Meanwhile, the Finance Minister anam Ramanarayana Reddy said that  said there was no possibility of any leakage of budget data. "The hacking of the website will not hamper my budget presentation at 12.10 PM in the Asssembly," he said.