GOI issues Alert as 12,000 Indian Websites are being targeted by Indonesian Hackers

New Delhi (India), 14th April 2023: 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 alert read, “It has been reported that websites of state and central government are potentially being targeted.”

Along with this, the government asked people to take preventive measures.

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 entities were reported to the Indian government in 2022, almost 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 mean when a computer network is deliberately brought to a halt by being inundated with data sent simultaneously from numerous different computers.

Additionally, it was noted in the notice that the hacktivist collective had made public a list of the state and federal websites that it claimed to be targeting.

Anand Prakash who is the CEO of cybersecurity company, Pingsafe said, “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.”