Govt seeks to protect websites from 9 June Anonymous attack

New Delhi: The Indian government is seeking to batten down the hatches against the 9 June cyber attack planned by the Anonymous Internet activist group over content censorship, besides seeking to track those said to be behind the campaign.

But it didn’t stop the group from claiming to have taken down the website of the state-run phone company Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd on Thursday.

Website managers should apply appropriate updates and patches on servers, besides keeping a close watch on Internet traffic, the government said last week in a letter, which has been reviewed by Mint.

It directed them to report any site intrusions and traffic abnormalities to the computer emergency response team, India’s apex agency that handles incidents related to cyber security.

“In the recent post on the Internet, the said hacker group has announced to carry out street protest on 9 June, 2012. The hacker group may also conduct defacement and launch distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks against websites of government and private organization during the time,” the advisory said.

Anonymous is a secretive Internet group that originated in 2003, its members largely unknown to each other, to fight any move it deems is against free speech on the Internet.

A DDoS attack is one in which a number of compromised systems attack a single target, causing denial of service for users of the targeted system.

On 17 May, even as both the government and opposition declined to support a move to annul the country’s IT (intermediaries guidelines) Rules 2011, Anonymous activists hacked the websites of the Supreme Court and the ruling Congress party to register their protest against the government’s bid to curb online access after several video-sharing websites were banned.

Last month, the Madras high court had permitted Reliance Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, a Reliance Group company, to ask Internet service providers to block specific video-sharing websites in response to a petition by the producers of the Tamil movie3, popular for its Kolaveri song.

Anonymous in retaliation targeted Big Cinemas, the movie-hall chain of the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Group, hacking its website earlier last month and accessing information on its customers in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

Officials investigating the attacks said the Anonymous group is using various techniques such as virtual private network (VPN) connections to hide their identity.

VPN interconnects remote, and often geographically separate, networks through primarily public communication infrastructures such as the Internet.

“We have tracked their identities and found that they are using VPN networks of Sweden and the US to target websites in India. They create a tunnel between India and Sweden and between US and India,” said an investigator who declined to be named. “It appears that they deliberately used these countries as data protection laws are very stringent in both the countries.”

Another official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the government is planning to lodge criminal cases against the hackers. “Once we complete our initial enquiry, a case will be registered against them,” the official said.

“The government does not have the ability to prevent attacks,” said Neelab Rai, an independent cyber security researcher. “At the maximum, they can minimize the impact.”

sahil.m@livemint.com