Airtel website hacked ?

Mobile, Personal Blogs

My 8Mbps broadband plan is sucking out money from the past 2 months; somehow I am managing to exceed the 4GB download limit.

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

airtel hacked

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka….. Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of their important offering e.g. Airtel Data card.

Check an example URL for Airtel Data card:

http://airtel.in/level2_t7.aspx?path=1/106

And its not just this URL; every URL in the site seems to have a awkward “level2” and path parameter. Also the path parameter seems to get a new value with every domain change and makes linking to their site a pain !

Update: Airtel portal is back in action; not sure who hacked it or whether it was some upgrade issue. The countless number of “srilanka” in the URL in a way conveys that it was probably not a server upgrade issue !

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Venu, currently the airtel website is working good so not sure whether it was hacked. But that could be pretty scary considering the fact that Airtel is a very big brand and invest heavily in all forms of I.T security.

  • Raj May 2, 2008 Link

    I visited airtel’s website on 30th and it looked okay. Even I noticed the change of domain and the weird URLs. They even have those dumb “landing” URLs 🙂

  • Venu May 2, 2008 Link

    Jeet,
    In fact after I published the post and checked on the portal, it was back online. So the portal remained hacked only for a brief time I believe.
    Was just wondering why the URL had to have “srilanka” !!

    Raj,
    Yes, I do know that Airtel has outsourced most of its IT activities to IBM and if this portal is also developed and maintained by them, not sure what to say 🙂

  • Nirmal May 2, 2008 Link

    I’m also able to access it. Not sure if it was hacked.

  • Venu May 2, 2008 Link

    I was not able to access at least for 10 min and the “srilanka” URL kept popping up !

    So something did happen; probably wasn’t in that state for long 🙂

  • Siddharth May 3, 2008 Link

    its working fine here 🙂

  • bigi Jun 10, 2008 Link

    the portal airtel.in is not available for the last two days as you have mentioned