Pakistan originated cyberattacks targets government sites ahead of G20

Just less then 24 hours before the the G20 Leaders' Summit was to take place in Delhi, threat actors allegedly from Pakistan and Indonesia started planning a coordinated cyber attack under the hashtag 'OpIndia' on all government websites.

The two-day G20 Summit taking place in the Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi will witness participation of leaders from 40 nations including the 20 member states. This is the first time that India is hosting the G20 Summit.

A slew of cyberattacks was launched by a Pakistan-based hacktivist group on government websites on the eve of the G20 Summit. India Today’s OSINT team traced the root of the group and the threat actors who launched the coordinated attack. There are multiple Indian websites will come under attack on the days of the G20 Summit.

The group, calling itself "Team Insane Pk", carried out approximately 2,450 targeted cyberattacks under the hashtag '#OpIndia'. Of these, over 50 per cent of the attacks were DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which are designed to overwhelm a website with traffic so that it becomes inaccessible.

Claims around possible cyber attacks were first reported by cyber intelligence platform Falcon Feeds. It has identified a large network of hacker groups, including outfits called Jambi Cyber Team and Ganosec Team, that has announced cyber attacks on Indian organisations. 

The other attacks included website defacement, where the hackers replaced the website's original content with their own message, and phishing, where they sent emails or text messages that appeared to be from legitimate sources in order to trick people into revealing their personal information.

The group claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for India's alleged human rights abuses in Kashmir. However, experts believe that the attacks were more likely motivated by political and economic rivalry between the two countries.

A strong team within agencies including the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC), I4C (Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre), Delhi Police, Intelligence Bureau (IB), Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are coordinating among each other to iron out cyber vulnerabilities ahead of the G20 Summit.