New Delhi: India’s official G20 website was attacked an average of 16 lakh times every minute while the group leaders’ summit was ongoing in New Delhi on 9 and 10 September last year, the government’s cybercrime body has said.
The website, g20.in, was subjected to a barrage of what is called “pings” as part of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, officers said.
A (DDoS attack is one that overwhelms websites with insurmountable traffic, generally by use of automated bots. The servers of these sites then fail to accommodate the extra load and become inaccessible for the desired users.
Rajesh Kumar, CEO of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) said Wednesday that the G20 website was attacked right after being launched but this peaked during the summit, when there was the greatest amount of interest to access official documents and declarations by the leaders and multilateral organisations.
The 14C is a central initiative to deal with cyber crime, and is affiliated with the Union home ministry.
Kumar was addressing the first annual press conference of the I4C and made the revelation while answering questions on the number of attack attempts on government infrastructure.
He did not, however, divulge details of the attackers or the locations from where the attacks took place. He added that these details came under the jurisdiction of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN).
He said that due to efforts by organisations such as CERT-IN, the National Informatics Centre and the I4C, India managed to stop the attempts to overwhelm the G20 website.
Asked by ThePrint if he could pinpoint any country in terms of the origin of these large-scale attacks, Kumar said: “I won’t hazard speculation. CERT-IN is the right organisation to talk about it.”
ThePrint reached out to the director general of CERT-IN, Dr Sanjay Bahl, but he refused to comment on whether there was any probe launched to identify the origin of the threats and the number of threat actors involved. He cited unawareness of the “context”.
India last year hosted the G20 summit for the first time since the multilateral organisation was formed in 1999, initially as a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors to deal with global economic and financial issues. Heads of state and government began attending the summit from 2008.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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