Indian security agencies
including cyber sleuths had their hands full in January this year, especially around the
inauguration of Ram Temple
in Ayodhya on January 22. According to a report in Economic Times, around the time of the Ram Mandir inauguration in January, hackers and cyber criminals, predominantly from China and Pakistan, were constantly targeting Indian websites.
Websites targeted by Pakistani and Chinese hackers
The Pakistani and Chinese hackers tried to bring down the websites of Ram Temple, Prasar Bharti and other digital assets of critical infrastructure in Uttar Pradesh (UP), officials told the financial daily.
How government stopped Pakistani and Chinese hackers' attack on Ram Mandir
Officials said that the government had anticipated a rise in cyber-attacks during the inauguration. The Telecom Security Operation Centre (TSOC) was monitoring around 264 websites including that of the Ram Temple, Prasar Bharti, UP Police, airport, UP tourism, and the power grid among others to prevent any cyber-attack. During the round the clock monitoring, it was observed that about 140 compromised IP addresses were targeting the Ram Temple and Prasar Bharti websites. Following identification, the internet service providers were asked to block access to those IP addresses. The report added that even after the blocking of these IP addresses it was observed that on January 21, malicious activities from these countries increased and more IP addresses were blocked. “After blocking 1244 IP addresses, the attacks reduced,” said an official.
Another official said that apart from foreign countries, some attempts were made from within India to access the digital infrastructure, for which remedial action was taken.
Desi solutions helped protect Ram Mandir
One of the officials told ET that we are proud of the fact that all the solutions to tackle the cyber-attacks were developed indigenously. "Before the inauguration of Ram Temple, a similar strategy was put in place to guard the digital infrastructure during the G20 summit,” he said. The Department of Telecommunications (
DoT
) used indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies for forecasting these cyber attacks.
Apart from securing the digital assets from cyber-attack, the DoT had also taken care of crowd management utilising digital data.
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