Smoke, mirrors and breaches: What’s really happening in India’s cyber space

As tensions flared across the India-Pakistan border in early May following a deadly terror strike in Jammu and Kashmir, another front opened up — not in the air or on land, but across servers and screens.

A series of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks flooded Indian websites with fake traffic, temporarily knocking several government portals and financial platforms offline. (DDoS attacks overwhelm a website with excessive data requests, rendering it inaccessible to real users.) 

In a matter of days, Telegram and dark web channels were abuzz with claims from multiple Pakistan-linked hacktivist groups. Lists of supposedly defaced Indian websites were circulated widely, with warnings of further breaches targeting everything from stock exchanges to Aadhaar-linked databases.

Read more at The Core