Some Indian government websites continue to allow the planting of scammy links on their official domains, months after TechCrunch reported the issue.
TechCrunch found more than 90 “gov.in” website links associated with Indian government departments — including the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and India Post, as well as state governments and councils of Haryana and Maharashtra and others — were redirecting to sites linked to online betting and investment scams.
Search engines like Google have indexed the scam links hosted on government sites, increasing the risk of regular internet users finding them.
In May, TechCrunch reported that around four dozen Indian government website links were redirecting to online betting platforms.
India’s cyber agency, the Computer Emergency Response Team, known as CERT-In, escalated the matter at the time.
However, it remained unclear whether the government had fixed the underlying flaw that the scammers were exploiting to plant their links.