With the gen-next wave of terror fast pervading the cyber space, ethical hackers are raising concern about most government websites being vulnerable to hacking.

According to city-based ethical hacker Sunny Vaghela, over 20 websites of the Gujarat government are vulnerable to hacking. "One can easily enter these websites, access the protected information and alter them without even leaving behind any trace," he said.

While he refused to reveal the names of websites, which run such risks, he pointed out that with the developer of most such sites being common, the flaws in all of them were identical.

"One of the biggest reasons of such vulnerability is that the server technologies and the website databases are not upgraded periodically," Vaghela said. According to him, a professional hacker takes about 24 hours to hack into the sites that have such vulnerability.

To begin with, he said, one starts off with gathering information about the server administration, "They look for web applications, operating system, data base versions and the number of open ports in the targeted website," he said, adding that once the vulnerabilities of the site is identified, the hacker moves into the sites after scanning the open ports.

"Another problem with the websites of the state government is that many of them don't even maintain a web-log. This means that if somebody hacks into a site and accesses the protected information, and leaves without making any change, one will never be able to know that," he added.

Vaghela, who has been assisting the Ahmedabad Crime Branch in tracing a number of e-mails, including the one sent by the Indian Mujaheedin before the July 26 serial blasts, said he has already reported the matter to the government authorities.

Vaghela had earlier created ripples in 2006 by demonstrating how calls can be forged from mobile phones, whereby the receiver of a call will see a different caller's number on his cellphone when de-facto the call is being made by someone else.