The official website of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was reportedly hacked and defaced on Tuesday morning.
The landing page of the website www.bjp.org, instead of displaying the party's content, showed a meme-GIF of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.
The main page also had a video of muppets singing Bohemian Rhapsody, the hit number of the British rock band Queen.
Later, the content was removed, and replaced with a message from 'web admin' that read: "Sorry for the inconvenience but we're performing some maintenance at the moment. we'll be back online shortly."
So far, the party has not released any statement on the issue on its social media handles.
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The website of the country's ruling political party stopped functioning amid brewing tensions between India and Pakistan following the Pulwama terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir in which 40 CRPF troopers were killed.
Within hours of the Pulwama attack, Pakistani-linked hackers reportedly attacked nearly 90 Indian government websites, leading India to initiate counter-offensive measures in cyberspace.
In the same week, Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was not working in several countries including the US.
Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal alleged that New Delhi was behind the attack.
According to a report in the Dawn, cross-border hacking attacks have been sporadic yet common since at least 1998.
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Fingers were pointed to India-based hackers when the official website of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was found defaced in June 2017. In December that year, the official website of Karachi police was hacked and defaced, allegedly by Indian hackers, the report said.
Earlier, in July 2016, hackers claiming to be from Pakistan defaced the websites of seven Indian embassies, high commissions, and consulates in various countries with pro-Pakistan Army slogans.
(with inputs from IANS)
