CERT India Attacked as Part of a “Silent Protest”

The website of India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has been temporarily shut down as a result of an attack launched by Anonymous India in OpIndia.

The hacktivists told Times of India that it wasn’t their intention to cause damage to the site, or to change its content. Apparently, the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack is a form of “silent protest.”

If, until recently, India hasn’t seen many hacktivist attacks, except for the ones launched by hackers from neighboring countries, in the past days a lot of high-profile websites have become targets of both local and international groups.

The list includes All India Congress, the Supreme Court of India, Reliance Big Entertainment, ABC Krishi Equipments, and many others.

The index webpage of ABC Krishi Equipment, a company that commercializes machinery used in agriculture, has been defaced to display a video that announces the start of Anonymous’ Operation India.

“Citizens of India, This site was hacked to protest internet censorship. For the past few days we have been protesting internet censorship in India by taking down India government websites and any site that supports the blocking of file sharing websites,” they wrote on the altered page.

The Indian Army’s site has also been taken down, but Anonymous has denied any involvement in the incident.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Indian government representatives claim that the site of the Supreme Court and the one of Congress haven’t been shut down as a result of cyberattacks.

“The site is not hacked at all. It was not opening for sometime because the load on the particular server was too heavy due to huge number of hits after the news of website hacking spread. It went slow at that time due to over-traffic,” Congress’ security chief revealed, according to Hindustan Times.

At press time, the site of CERT India was still experiencing performance issues, but the hackers revealed that they had stopped the attack.

“Well, the ships are moving away from http://cert-in.org.in and back out to the stormy seas,” Anonymous tweeted.