Internet providers claim DDoS attack; to meet top cop

Internet service providers (ISPs), mainly from Mumbai and Pune, have claimed that they are being targeted in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for the second time in last three months and said they will raise the threat of "cyber terrorism".
The ISPs said they will call on Inspector General of Police (Cyber), Maharashtra Brijesh Singh as they claim that their complaint was not taken seriously by the Pune Police.
"We have been facing DDoS attack since September 15 last month and are running from pillar to post to lodge our complaint. But no officer from the Pune Police has taken a serious stand on our complaint and finally we are going to lodge our complaint with the IGP (Cyber), Brijesh Singh," said Kishore Desarda, the Director of Gazon Communication of India.

A denial of service attack typically bombards websites with requests, overloading the portal until its server crashes, thus denying access of the website to legitimate users.
"Such attacks, which reduce (Internet) speed to almost zero, have posed a serious threat to businesses of all ISPs, not only in Mumbai and Pune alone, but across Maharashtra, and they need to be curbed immediately," said Desarda.
In July, ISPs had filed an FIR with IG's office about DDoS attack and the case is being investigated by cyber cell of Mumbai Police.

Another leading Internet service provider said, "DDoS attackers are back into their business and it has hit the services adversely in the cities like Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai and Pune, beside posing a serious threat to the information backbone of the country."

"This unprecedented attack on ISPs is akin to cyber terrorism and has assumed extreme significance against the backdrop of hacking of more than 35 websites of Central and state governments in last few days after India's surgical strikes across the Line of Control," it added.
In July, representatives of ISPs had met Singh and apprised him about the gravity of this sort of "cyber terrorism". Following their request, the cyber cell had registered an FIR and launched a probe.
"Some unknown people are involved in crashing the network of ISPs by making lakhs of requests at a particular terminal at a particular time at an unprecedented level, thus slowing down the whole internet experience, which we call Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS). Cyber Crime department was taking all possible measures to nab the perpetrators," Singh had told PTI.

Explaining a DDoS attack, Singh, who is an IT expert himself, had said, "Suppose a person runs an online reservation centre and particular server is equipped to handle 100 users at a time. DDoS perpetrators create 1,000 log-ins by pre-programming at one time and send lakhs of requests at the same time, which subsequently crashes the port or the servers.