SRFDCL’s website hacked, language changed to Japanese

AHMEDABAD: The official website of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation Ltd (SRFDCL), operated by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, was possibly hacked. One of the signs being that the language of SRFDCL website’s meta description — which is the short information on the website — on Google search results to Japanese.


“It’s possible that the website was hacked and the meta or short description for the website on Google was altered to Japanese. Right now, the meta description for SRFDCL website in Japanese depicts ‘sale and discounts on beds’. We have informed our website developers and their technical teams have managed to redirect it to our parent web address and have since cleaned it up. However, Google might still be showing the old, compromised meta description in its search results until the next Google crawl and re-indexing of the site. Google’s search crawlers take time to index changes made to a website,” said asenior AMC official.
AMC officials have been checking whether there was any attempt to redirect web traffic to malicious sites or to display unwanted content in search results.
“The hackers might not have fully taken over the site yet, or the malicious code might be designed to only affect the meta information displayed in search results,” the official said.