- Wednesday, December 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
A group named ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ has claimed to have issued a list of 12,000 government websites in India, including both federal and state, which it may attack in the coming days, an alert issued by the Indian home affairs ministry’s Cybercrime Coordination Centre (14C) has said.
The alert, which was circulated to all agencies — federal and state government wings — on Thursday (13), based on inputs received by 14C’s Cyber Threat Intelligence wing inputs following its open-source intelligence, ANI reported.
The narrative was detected by the Cyber Threat Intelligence wing about the ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ group that has been involved in an illegal operation to hack sites in India and some other countries, the ANI report added.
The input was first shared with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert.In), a nodal agency under the ministry of electronics and information technology, which had requested to share the information with the nodal cyber-crime units in the states about the “potential threat”.
“A group named ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ has been targetting India, and it has created a narrative that it will attack 12,0000 Indian government websites that include central and those linked to states,” said sources citing the alert circulated, adding “it is, however, not necessarily whether the group belongs to Indonesia.”
The group ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ might be from “Malaysia or a set of different Islamic countries” because people with similar mindsets are trying to attack (India) using cyberspace, the source added.
“The hacktivist group can also attack China or Ukraine. They also attack different countries,” said the source, pointing people from different countries are attacking in the ongoing illegal cyber operation and ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ is among those group planning attacks by means of open source.
“The ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ has been attacking not only Indian websites but also the websites of other countries. They have circulated a list of 12,000 Indian government websites which they want to target. I4C unit through its open source intelligence alerted the Cert.In about such ongoing activities, suggesting to be aware,” the source was quoted as saying.
As per cyber experts in the home ministry, “this narrative has been going on since last year”.
“Such hackers attack government websites and try to slow down these websites using different means. However, government websites are updated. This is not a new thing. Last year too, similar attempts were made by such hackers to attack several websites in Gujarat. The hackers try to send heavy internet traffic to slow down the websites so that users get affected and they could not access or connected online services and sites,” the experts were quoted as saying by ANI.
Considering the threat perspective, the federal government has already informed the states through cyber-crime and cyber security how to protect their websites, a senior home ministry official told ANI requesting anonymity, and informed that “there is also a GIGW (Guidelines for Indian Government Websites) guideline which helps in keeping control on such illegal activities of the hackers”.
(With agency inputs)
