Indonesian hackers target 12,000 Indian govt sites, cybersecurity alert issued

Hackers from Indonesia have set their eyes on 12,000 Indian government sites, Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) on Thursday said.

In view of the threats, the Ministry of Home Affairs' I4C wing alerted the States and the UTs as the Indonesian cyber attack group hatches a conspiracy to implement their ill intentions, ANI reported citing its sources.

"It has been reported that websites of State and Central government are potentially being targeted," part of the release said.

The inputs given to the states and UTs advise the concerned officials to take necessary preventive measures to thwart the cyber attack.

Hackers plan to carry out Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This overwhelms a computer network by bringing in too much traffic, thereby disrupting normal operations, according to a report in Republic.

"Post this alert, government employees need to ensure that they do not fall for social engineering attacks; do not click on unknown emails or links, which can compromise security of such websites. They also ensure that all software updates are up-to-date," Money Control quoted Anand Prakash, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Pingsafe, as saying.

It may be recalled that Delhi's AIIMS servers were attacked by hackers last year.

With the server down, the outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services, including smart lab, billing, report generation and the appointment system, remained affected. A case of extortion and cyber terrorism was registered by the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police on November 25.

Also, Indian government websites came under attack from Malaysian hacktivist group DragonForce following the controversy around Prophet Muhammed.

In 2022 alone, the country reported 13.91 lakh cyber security incidents, MoS for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrashekhar had told the Parliament.