Skip to main content

Story of a Drupal theme mis-configuration, Hacking and Ministry of Defense India

If you have been following news or were online for past couple of hours you might have noticed this news making a tweet-storm and appearing all over your timeline regarding how India's Ministry of Defense website got hacked (allegedly by 'Chinese' origin).

Almost all the big media outlets covered it. Including

An example of the coverage


Fueled by our own famous ministers chiming in with their own ideas


It all seemed for the fact that the homepage of the websites showed this image with a Chinese character
And though most of india's government portals and websites aren't really what we call secure (I'll cite the references later), hilariously this time it really was not a hack!

I got tired of explaining everyone in social media again and again what went wrong hence this blogpost.

It really was just a mis-configured Drupal theme :)

You see, most of the websites by NIC for government portals are made using a CMS called Drupal. Which is not a bad thing itself, White House's website is made in Drupal. But the hilarious thing is they were using a theme called Zen (https://www.drupal.org/project/zen) and though they customized the theme to suit the respective government portals, they did not customize the maintenance page!

Any idea what is Zen Theme's logo?

Now see the character on that screenshot and in the logo? 

And now the most awesome part is, that character is not even Chinese. It's Japanese (Kanji to be precise ç¦…). After reading all this if you are in need of some Zen, I won't blame you. Head over to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen

Still don't believe me? Then look at the source code.
The Zen theme logo is located at : https://github.com/JohnAlbin/now/blob/master/www/sites/all/themes/zen/logo.png

And it is referenced at Line 46 of the maintenance template file.

And that logo.png file is this one 

So in short, those claims about hack are not true!




Next time, please don't believe everything you read in the internet? Specially if it's coming from our renowned ministers....

Attribution:
The last two screenshots  and the first list of links of news portals are taken from Tanay's blog (linked). Here is my due attribution along with one for newsmobile.in from whom I took the first image with "hacked" logo :)
PS: while looking for his blog I just found out a list of websites which use Drupal in Indian Govt. work by Tanay here: https://groups.drupal.org/node/248708 so any of them using zen theme should have displayed that logo today (unless someone customized it)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow
Post a Comment
Read more

Immersive Payment: Second Update

This is the second update to the Immersive Payment project update under the Grant For Web Fellowship. You can read the last report here:  https://blog.rabimba.com/2021/05/immersive-payment-first-update.html Background Technically, WebXR is a device API that makes it possible to distribute VR/AR experiences over a web browser. It is broadly used to describe web based VR/AR experiences. The web is the biggest platform, able to reach almost every device and balance the power with app stores through permissionless innovation. However, there’s a major issue holding the ecosystem back from growing: monetization. There’s a reason why 99% of WebXR apps look like prototypes, it’s because indie creators struggle with finding ways to capture value. More polished experiences like Mozilla Hubs and Frame usually have the backing of a large entity, so they can survive. While many of the apps on the front page of Oculus Store net millions in sales, apps on the startpage for Oculus browser (#1 app) c
Post a Comment
Read more

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at
Read more