The website of news agency ANI (Asian News International) has gone offline after a hacking attack. Mysterious Team, a Bangladesh-based hacker group, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
They announced on Twitter, “Indian South Asian News Agency @ANI website dropped”, with a screenshot showing that the website aninews.in is not available. They also used the hashtag #OpIndia23, which supposedly refers to Operation India 2023.
The website of ANI is not accessible at the time of publishing this report, showing the error message 502, bad gateway, which indicates that there is something wrong with a website’s server communication.
Reacting to the development, Smita Prakash, Editor-in-Chief of ANI, Smita Prakash, tweeted ‘It’s a constant attack on us’.
The hacking comes just days after two Twitter accounts of ANI were blocked by Twitter saying that they were under the age of 13 years. However, the accounts were later restored.
The Bangladeshi hacking group took down the website of another Indian news agency IANS yesterday, however the site is now back online.
They also attacked the site of Cert-inIndian Computer Emergency Response Team under the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, which also has been restored.
The group has been continuously targeting Indian websites, and have taken down several sites related to Indian govt, Indian political parties and politicians, including Samajwadi Party, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath and others.