During G20 Summit, Delhi Police website hit by 3-4 cyber attacks
Police said efforts are on to identify the hackers and an investigation is being conducted.
3 min read
Around 10k cops were deployed during G20 summit. (Express File Photo) The Delhi Police’s official website saw three to four cyber-attacks over three days during the G20 Summit — all within hours of each other — and remained temporarily inaccessible for 10-30 minutes each time, The Indian Express has learnt.
On Monday, police said a group of unknown hackers, who call themselves ‘Team Insane PK’, had attacked the website multiple times. Police sources also said cyber attacks were detected on other government websites — including the Mumbai Police site — during the Summit. Following this, a Ministry of Home Affairs-level team was activated on Friday evening to prevent such attacks and restore the websites’ functions.
Senior police officers said the hackers are based in Pakistan and have been targeting websites in two ways — Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks, in which multiple servers are used to flood the source website and bring it down, and defacement attacks.
The hackers attacked the Delhi Police’s site using the first method, said police. The site displayed a message saying, “This service isn’t available.”
“We had detected multiple attacks during the Summit. However, our teams worked with MHA-level officers, and the website was restored successfully within minutes. We learnt this was a cyber terror attack to defame the Delhi Police and our country since we are the G20 hosts. In such cases, we usually take out our servers and shut down the system. We then fight the virus and restore the entire portal…,” said an officer from the Delhi Police Headquarters.
Officers said despite their efforts, the firewall was attacked again. All citizen and police services were shut and important data was accessed by hackers, said police.
The Delhi Police website has multiple portals for citizens, policemen, traffic police, the Economic Offences Wing etc. Citizen portals have options to view FIRs, complaints, e-theft FIRs, RTI information and details about unidentified persons found and unclaimed vehicles seized. Police services include Zipnet, dossiers, FSL, conviction details, court rulings, police circulars, notifications, orders etc.
Police said efforts are on to identify the hackers and an investigation is being conducted. “While the cyber cell has not registered an FIR, the matter has been flagged to higher authorities at the DRDO and CERT-In. They are working to prevent further attacks since other government sites were also targeted,” added the officer.
Police said the hackers run a Telegram channel and have uploaded posts claiming responsibility for the attacks. One of the posts read, “Delhi Police Official Website Again has been down… Where is the Delhi Police firewall… Team Insane PK.”
(edited by Nikitha Phyllis)
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