FIR filed after internet service providers across Mumbai complain of cyber attack
Many users had been calling in about very slow speeds from across the city, causing the police to suspect an organised crime.
For the first time ever in the country, the Cyber Crime Branch of Maharashtra Police on Sunday registered an FIR in connection with the Distributed Denial of Service attack on Internet Service Providers in the state. A DDOS attack is when an online network or service is targeted by multiple sources, causing trouble for all its users.
The police took note of the attack after several complaints of very slow internet speeds started pouring in from all over Mumbai from July 18 onward. The Cyber Crime department is currently working with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team to mitigate the attack and trace the source. Inspector General of Police (Cyber Crime) Brijesh Singh said, “An FIR has been filed with the Cyber police station under Sections 43 (F) and 66 of the Information Technology Act. We are investigating.”
Singh said some unknown people are involved in crashing the ports of ISPs by making lakhs of requests at a particular terminal at a particular time. The Hindu reported that the attack is an unprecedented one and is being carried out at a speed of 200 gigabytes per second.
According to the police, the culprits are targeting small and medium ISPs that have commercial entities as subscribers. Such ISPs do not have the infrastructure to ward off an attack of this magnitude. Cyber lawyer Prashant Mali told the Times of India that the reason behind a DDoS attack is usually business rivalry, but the motive this time seems to be an attempt to hamper economic growth by targeting e-commerce.
