Agencies continue to thwart China cyber attacks on India

New Delhi, June 23: Amidst the tensions at the border, Indian agencies have warned that China would look to unleash a series of cyber attacks.

Attempts are being made every minute to carry out cyber attacks and so far the Indian agencies have been successful in thwarting most of them.

Activity has been particularly high since early June. On June 18, the Indian agencies had said that China had opened another front of attacks with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks on the Indian information websites.

The attacks are also on the country's financial payments system, Intelligence Bureau officials have told OneIndia.

The DDOS attacks are malicious attempts to hit a network by flooding it with artificially created internet traffic. The IB source says that several targets such as ATMs, banking systems and government websites have been zeroed in on.

Investigations have shown that these attacks have been traced to Chengdu, which is the headquarters of the People's Liberation Army's Unit 61398. However, all the attacks were unsuccessful and they were thwarted.

Meanwhile, Indian Intelligence agencies have flagged the use of several Chinese apps stating that they are capable of extracting a large amount of data.

These include Zoom, Tik Tok, UC Browser, Shareit, Xender and Clean Master.

The intel has said that these apps had the potential to be used as spyware and this could be detrimental to national security.

In April, the Union Home Ministry had issued an advisory on the secure use of Zoom meeting platform by private individuals. It said that it not for use by government offices, officials or official purposes.

The advisory said that Zoom is not a safe platform. Those private individuals who would still like to use Zoom for private purposes may follow the guidelines, the MHA had also said.