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.
The online protest will be buttressed with real-world street protests on Saturday, according to the group. The government has meanwhile issued an advisory to its departments and private organizations that host websites and run data centres about protecting themselves from attack.
“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.
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.”
