Abu Dhabi: The Indian embassy’s website was not available on Wednesday. The website www.indembassyuae.org was responding with a message: “This account has been suspended; please contact the billing department as soon possible.”
Then the page was automatically redirected to www.cleverdot.com, website of a web developer, which gave packages for various web services.
The Indian Embassy said the web operator shut down the embassy’s website following a virus attack late on Tuesday evening.
“There was no billing issue at all; it is a wrong message due to a virus attack and the web operator is working on to fix it,” T.P Seetharam, Indian Ambassador to the UAE, told Gulf News on Wednesday.
He said the page was wrongly redirected to a web developer’s website due to virus attack. “They [cleverdot.com] are not hosting our website.”
However he did not reveal the name of the embassy’s web operator, citing security reasons.
Asked whether it was a hacking attempt, the envoy said : “No, it was a normal virus attack only. The virus could have come by email.”
Social media
The web operator is working on it and the website is expected to be back by Thursday, Seetharam said.
The Indian Consulate General’s website www.cgidubai.com was working as usual.
On July 30, 2012, the official website of the Indian Consulate General in Dubai was apparently hacked with its URL leading to strange advertisements.
As Gulf News reported, the consulate officials then insisted the site was not hacked but faced a technical snag. But word was spread on social media and among members of the Indian community in Dubai saying otherwise.
However, technical experts claimed that if the website had not been hacked, it wouldn’t redirect to other sites or advertisements as in the case of the CGI website. The website was restored soon.
