12,000 Indian Govt Websites Under Hacking Threat By Indonesian Hacker; Centre Issues Alert

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New Delhi: According to a cybersecurity notice released by the Centre, an Indonesian hacker organisation is purportedly targeting 12,000 government websites in India. The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, released the alert on Thursday, according to Moneycontrol.

The advisory urged concerned government employees to take preventive steps and stated that "it has been claimed that websites of state and central government are potentially being targeted." ()

All India Institute of Medical Science's (AIIMS) systems were severely damaged by a huge ransomware attack last year, making its central records inaccessible in addition to other hospital services. ()

In total, 19 ransomware attacks on various government organisations were reported to the Indian government in 2022, about three times as many as were reported the year before.

According to the I4C notice, an Indonesian "hacktivist" organisation was conducting distributed denial of service (DDoS) and denial of service (DoS) attacks. DDoS assaults are when a computer network is deliberately brought to a halt by being inundated with data sent simultaneously from numerous different computers.

The hacktivist collective, which comprised state and federal government websites, had allegedly posted a list of websites that it claimed to be targeting, according to the notice.

Government employees must be careful to avoid social engineering scams after receiving this alert; they must also be careful not to click on any links or emails that they don't recognise because doing so could jeopardise the security of sensitive websites. Also, they guarantee that all software upgrades are current, according to Anand Prakash, founder and CEO of the cybersecurity company Pingsafe.

A Malaysian hacktivist gang targeted Indian government websites last year as a result of political unrest caused by remarks made against the Prophet Muhammad.

Many Indian official websites, including those of the Indian Embassy in Israel (indembassisrael[.]gov[.]in) and the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management, were hacked by the Malaysian hacker group DragonForce (manage[.]gov[.]in).