G20 website saw 16L cyberattacks a minute

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, January 3

National agencies successfully thwarted a massive coordinated cyber attack on India’s G20 website at the peak of the global summit hosted by PM Narendra Modi in New Delhi on September 9 and 10, 2023.

The official summit website, at the height of the event, saw as many as 16 lakh cyber intrusions a minute by way of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which have emerged as a primary concern in Internet security worldwide.

“The DDoS attacks which were meant to interrupt the summit and embarrass India started soon after the G20 website was launched last year. The attacks peaked during the G20 summit when we saw 16 lakh attacks a minute on the website. The attacks were thwarted by a coordinated response of national agencies,” said Rajesh Kumar, CEO, Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.

He did not attribute the cyber attack to any country. Attributions are difficult, he said. The expert however cited national data to flag a rising trend of cyber frauds originating abroad. The National Cybercrime Reporting Portal on an average received 50,000 daily complaints on toll-free number 1930 in 2023. Of these, 40 to 50 per cent originated outside India. “Nearly 40-50 per cent of the 5,000 daily complaints on the portal stem from countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and China,” Kumar said.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre has evidence of foreign gangs enticing Indians online with lucrative work from home offers and then trapping them in frauds.

Govt on target

492 instances of phishing and smishing, 35 ransomware attacks and 151 cases of website hacking involving government departments have been reported in past three years, according to government data.