Antrix Corporation's website suspected to be hacked

Home page is leading to cheap sports apparel site

Two days after Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has successfully launched five satellites for its commercial arm Antrix Corporation for a UK customer, the company's website seems to have been hacked. Isro officials say they are not aware of hacking, but the home page of Antrix tells a different story.

A visit to the home page of www.antrix.gov.in, on Sunday lead the visitor to another page, a page named projersey.com, which features cheap sports apparels for sale. While the links to the other pages of Antrix Corporation, if accessed through a search engine, was working earlier during the day, it has been blocked later.

While reports suggest that the website has been hacked by some Chinese hackers, Isro officials did not comment on whether it is hacking or some other technical glitch.

"The pages are being blocked now as per sources from Antrix. We do not know about hacking. Antrix home page was getting linked to some other website. Antrix website contains public information only. Nothing to worry. It is blocked," said a senior official from Isro. It is not known how much time it would take for the company to fix the issue, and a question towards this left unanswered.

It may be noted that Antrix's exclusive commercial launch of five satellites from United Kingdom, one of the heaviest commercial launch ever by the company, was successfully completed on July 10. It has launched three identical DMC3 optical earth observation satellites, built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), United Kingdom, and two auxiliary satellites on Friday. With this, the company has completed launch of 45 commercial satellites from 1999. The company currently has28 launch service contracts in its kitty to complete in next two to three years.

Antrix Corporation is a wholly owned Government of India company under the administrative control of the Department of Space, Government of India. Incorporated as a private limited company in September 1992, it has been a marketing arm of Isro for promotion and commercial exploitation of space products, technical consultancy services and transfer of technologies developed by ISRO. Another major objective of the company is to facilitate development of space related industrial capabilities in India.

As the commercial and marketing arm of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Antrix is engaged in providing Space products and services to international customers worldwide. It provides end-to-end solutions for  space products ranging from supply of hardware and software including simple subsystems to a complex spacecraft. Mission support services along with consultancy and training services are also offered by Antrix, according to the company officials.