14 DAY TRIAL // India’s Cyber Defense Research Center (CDRC), a newly formed organization whose main task is to protect government agencies against cyberattacks and to raise awareness of threats from cyberspace, has managed to fend off an attack that targeted the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI).
According to The Telegraph India, on Monday, experts from CDRC in Ranchi noticed an unusual activity at one of the CBI’s main servers in New Delhi.
The attackers, apparently located in a country from Southeast Asia, planted a spam application which had the potential to compromise both the CBI’s server and its public website.
Fortunately, the CDRC managed to mitigate the threat and take control of the situation.
“Such attacks on Indian security agency websites aren’t new. But an attack on the CBI’s server means someone, somewhere was trying to poke here and there, hijack files, details, among others,” an official explained.
“Anything could have happened. However, the fact that CDRC managed to block the menace is a great achievement because it is only two or three months old.”
Although the cyber defense agency is new, it clearly has its work cut out to protect India’s networks.
Around a month ago, they identified a threat that targeted the website of the Trinamul Congress Party. Unfortunately, the organization’s representatives failed to act in time and the site was hacked.
This is not the first time we hear that an Indian government institution is attacked. A few days ago we learned that cybercriminals breached the systems of the country’s Navy, planting an information-stealing malware that could have caused a lot of damage.
Another problem that India has is related to the online battle between the country’s hacktivists and the ones from Bangladesh, Pakistan and other neighbors. Protests against India’s border police and its presence in the Kashmir area have mainly affected commercial sites, but government domains are most certainly a target.